Exploring the Clouds
by EXNativo
Summary: You'd think the person destined to save the world would be kind of... heroic, right? Well, that's kind of good, for a first guess. Chapter 13: '"If anything happens to that crystal, I will cry. Don't make me cry."' - Set in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. Warning: foul language.
1. Chapter 1

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is probably my favourite Pokémon game ever so far. I haven't read any fanfiction for it, nor have I written any, but I figure why not? I want to write a story that incorporates some of the better elements from all over the franchise, and I can leave this here for if I ever feel like continuing it some day.

No promises. I'm a busy person.

 **Disclaimer: I have no idea who this belongs to, and I don't really care, but it's not me.**

 **XxX**

It wasn't too uncommon for me to black out somewhere in the street.

I know, that sounds really bad when I put it like that. Trust me, it's just as bad as you think it may be. Blacking out was usually the best part of my day, to be honest. It was the best excuse I could ever think of to stop caring about absolutely everything around me.

Of course, it's not like I needed a reason, what with being a street urchin ever since my teenage years. Blacking out came in handy whenever I managed to piss off the wrong person. You know the types, the ones who anger easily and know well enough how to throw a punch.

Once you start caring, you stop surviving.

But either way, this time was strange. I couldn't recall exactly why I'd wound up on my back, with the sun beating down on my closed eyelids and a fucking mariachi band playing in my ears. Usually whoever had beaten my shit into oblivion would stay in my mind, which was probably how I'd managed to keep myself alive so long. I knew who to avoid, and if I was feeling particularly confident, I knew exactly who to take revenge on.

Not so much this time. All I could remember was a blinding flash of light, and the throbbing pain of the can I'd just unearthed landing directly on my big toe. That fucking sucked, let me tell you. Both the pain, and the fact that I'd now probably lost that nice, full can of beans to some of the other gutter trash in this shithole of a city.

"What happened!? Are you OK!?"

Oh, no, wait, someone was concerned for me. A girl, by the sounds of it. Pretty damn young too, probably barely old enough to figure out that I wasn't the type of person her parents would her to be around. The light was beginning to seep through my eyelids as I cracked them open, and with no small degree of difficulty, I managed to push myself up slightly.

The ground beneath my hands shifted, and suddenly, the sounds of crashing waves hit my eardrums. It felt kind of like sand, so…was I at the beach? If I was, then it wasn't on my own accord. I hated the beach; far too bright for my liking. My eyes were still fuzzy, but I could have sworn the person looking down at me was a fucking cat.

So I was high, too. That was a plus.

"The fuck am I?" I grunted, trying to blink my eyes back into their sockets. Damn, they stung almost as much as my throat did, and when I went to rub them, I accidentally managed to punch myself in the nose.

Ow. Fuck. What the hell was that doing out there?

"Um…you're on the beach." Apparently, the cat could talk. It sort of looked familiar, like a character from an anime I used to watch as a kid that never really took off. Why my brain decided that it would be the first hallucination I laid eyes upon, I didn't even want to know. "So, you OK, right? You really gave me a fright!"

"You never seen a guy passed out on the beach before?" My nose had stopped stinging, and now, I had taken to staring at my hands. They were different, very blue and paw looking. I was kind of wishing I knew just what I took…last night? This morning? A few minutes ago? Hell if I know, but I was going to stay the fuck away from it from now on. "Holy shit, you're pretty sheltered."

"…No, I haven't." The cat tilted her head to the side, watching as I ran a hand over my nose, down my chest, and over the tail that had sprouted from the general area of my ass. Yeah, it was safe to say that at this point, I was officially confused as all fuck. It all felt so…so real. "My name's Skitty. What's yours?"

"Luke." I had to hand it to this cat, it had balls. Maybe. I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl, but insisting on talking to me whilst I was in this state took some courage. Or maybe it was too stupid to realise that I was off my tits, either or. I could respect that. "Sorry. Last night was kinda wild. I think."

"That's... fine. You seem like an alright Pokémon, anyway." The cat- Skitty smiled sheepishly, looking somewhat embarrassed. How I could identify that, I didn't know, but at this point, I was already beyond questioning things. Apart from whatever the fuck 'Pokémon' meant. Was that a slur? Should I have been offended? "Sorry that I doubted you. More and more Pokémon have been turning aggressive recently, you see. It's been getting kind of dangerous to be out alone…"

Absently, I nodded along to whatever Skitty was telling me, barely listening. Finding out that even my imagination had gang problems didn't really surprise me, but that discovery was forced onto the back-burner as a bat and a… what the fuck was that thing? A ball, a balloon? God damn, I was out of it.

Whatever it was, they were coming at us pretty quickly, and the bat didn't even try to slow down before it slammed into Skitty's back. She came rocketing forward with a pained cry, and I barely stumbled back as I reached out to catch her. Huh, either this body was pretty tough, or Skitty didn't weigh even as much as a feather.

"Oh, pardon me." The ball said, his voice coming out in a croak. Sure, it was pretty funny, watching it talk, but the gas it was constantly spouting can't have been good for the environment. Plus, I didn't like the way it was looking at me, with some sort of smug superiority that just didn't belong on something that looked like that.

Carefully, I pushed Skitty back onto her feet, looking up to watch as the bat and his balloon began to loom over a pretty stone that I could have sworn hadn't been there a second ago. Skitty came whirling around, tears of what I would have assumed to be pain gathering in the corner of her eyes.

"What was that for!?" She demanded, her ears pressed against her head. The anger faded almost immediately as her eyes landed on the stone, her mouth dropping open. The bat laughed, his voice screech and just plain unpleasant, sweeping one wing against the ground and scooping the stone up.

"Can't figure it out?" He taunted, juggling the stone between his wings. OK, so I could tell at this point that he was a dick, but that was pretty damn impressive. No fingers or grip, and being able to throw the stone around without a care in the world? I doubt I would have been able to do that. "We wanted to mess with ya! This is yours, isn't it?"

"That's…!" Skitty's voice was filled with anguish, and the frown I had been wearing since I woke up deepened. She couldn't have been much more than a child, and these guys were just gonna rob her? Sure, they hadn't come out and said it, but I'd been in enough situations on both sides to know what was going on.

"Sorry, kiddo, we'll take that!" Fucking called it. The stone had already disappeared into some sort of satchel that the ball was wearing, which I had somehow missed up until this point. To be fair, I was doing my best to not look at its disgusting face.

"You know, for hallucinations, you're both assholes."

Why did I choose that moment to interject? I dunno, maybe it was because I just didn't know when to shut up. My throat still felt like it'd just lost a fight against a cheese grater, but not even that would stop me from using it. It'd gotten my ass beaten more times than I cared to remember, but that was hardly worth caring about.

"Whoa-ho-ho! You talk pretty big! I don't see any hallucinations!" Great, the ball was in denial. Then again, he wasn't looking at the bat, and I don't think he would have been able to see his own body, given where his eyes were in relation to it. He was looking at me, though, and I looked a fucking sight right now, lemme tell you. I had a tail and everything.

All of a sudden, they were both zooming past us, towards a gaping hole in the cliff that I didn't even realise I was standing next to. Wow, I really need to work on my situational awareness.

"If you want it back, come and get it!" The bat called over its… did it have a shoulder? Eh, I don't fucking care. I was too busy checking to make sure his grating voice hadn't caused my eardrums to burst.

"That…that was my personal treasure. It means everything to me…" From beside me, Skitty sniffed, her own tail coming forth to rub away her tears. I wouldn't have done that if I were her, there was no good way for her to have known where that tail had been. Without warning, she turned to me, her eyes somehow still closed. How did she know where I was? Could she smell me?

"Please, you have to help me get it back!"

"I don't have to do shit," was on the tip of my tongue, but even as my mouth opened to fire it off, I stopped myself. I was still convinced that none of this shit was real, no matter how it felt, but if my head was concocting this, what would the consequences of not going along with it be?

I was probably already somewhere in the ball park of insane, so there wasn't really any danger on that front. You know, relatively speaking. But still, the slight, tiny possibility of this being real entered my mind, bringing along with it the realisation that, if this crazy shit somehow wasn't just my imagination, I would be turning down helping someone who I just watched be abused and mugged. Not just someone, either; at this point I was utterly convinced that Skitty couldn't have been any more than a young teenager.

Was this what epiphanies felt like? If so, they fucking sucked.

"Eh, why not?" With that, I tottered off towards the cave, this body far more nimble than what I was used to. Sure, it was kinda odd, but I think I preferred this one over the starved and perpetually sickly human husk that I'd probably left behind. Fuck, now I was hoping this was real, because damn if it wasn't better in almost every way that I could see. "Let's go."

 **XxX**

Oh yeah, this was the fucking life.

Skitty hadn't been fucking around when she said the other Pokémon (who I was just referring to as people, it was easier) had been getting pissy as of late. Of course, I hadn't exactly known any of them beforehand, but I think I liked them better now.

For one, they didn't screw around. This was their territory, and they made it very clear to us that they didn't appreciate intruders. We were jumped almost as soon as we'd stepped into the surprisingly well-lit cave, a snail charging at us with speed no snail had any right to go at.

The thing had jumped at me, yeah, fucking JUMPED at me, slinging the mud covering its body every which way as it came at me. My response had been to spin around, enjoying the fuck out my new body as I effortlessly slammed my foot into the side of the thing's noggin. The thing had toppled away, and from there, Skitty had slammed into it with the force of a freight train, and I had almost choked on my own God damn tongue as it carved a new crater into the wall with its own body.

If I had known that we were going to be fighting, I would have chalked Skitty up to being too scared to even look at something wrong. Instead, she was as fierce as a fucking tiger, effortlessly keeping up with me as we systematically demolished absolutely everything that tried to start something. I was having the time of my life as everything gave me a reason to beat the shit of it, and that enjoyment only increased after Skitty yelled for me to start using my Moves when a particularly large group of Corsola and Shellder literally burst out the fucking shadows beside us.

Before I could ask her what the Hell she was on about, something in my head clicked, and all of a sudden I just…knew. I've gotta tell you, I don't know how I ever lived without Quick Attack before.

Everything was a blur as I sprinted through the crowds, lashing out with punches, kicks and Bites. For all of their aggressiveness, nothing that came forth to attack us was all that powerful, and it didn't take us long to get through the entirety of the cave.

Something pretty awesome had happened on the way, when one of my paws had flashed a second before the punch landed on a Shellos' stupid looking face. At first, I'd been confused as a penguin in Madagascar, but after a while I figured out that I'd just learned a new move. I'd been content with just calling it the 'Fuck You Fist', but something in my head had said that I was stupid, and Force Palm was obviously a way cooler name.

I didn't agree, but then I reminded myself that I was already high, and getting into an argument with a voice in my head on top of that wasn't something I was too interested in. Force Palm would have to do. Along with Counter, which I still hadn't found a use for yet, that brought the number of my available moves up to six.

I was idly throwing a stick that I'd accidentally torn from a Corsola's head a couple of minutes back, courtesy of a Force Palm, when something ahead caught my eye. Automatically, my pupils lit up with a Foresight, Skitty's following along a second later. After a moment, she gulped nervously, and I couldn't resist the urge to roll my eyes.

"Uh…h-hey!" She called out, her voice cracking near the end. I hung my head and rubbed at my temple with my Corsola piece, not even bothering with caution as Koffing and Zubat (as their species were apparently called, I really couldn't fucking care less) turned around to face us. She had been able to keep up with me in our merry jaunt of destruction through the cave (and I really, really loved causing destruction), but these two morons still made her anxious? Talk about bipolar.

"Heh-heh-heh, if it isn't our old friend." Zubat nudged Koffing with his wing, his fangs on full display with his grin. "The big chicken!"

At that point, I groaned. Loudly. What was this, elementary school?

"Give me… give me back what you stole from me!" I wasn't exactly sure what Skitty was going for, but 'two seconds away from pissing myself' wasn't the best tone to take when trying to intimidate someone into doing what you wanted them to do. Maybe that was her plan, and it was a bluff? "That's my personal treasure! It means everything to me!"

Nobody seemed to notice as I tilted my head back up. Koffing and Zubat were too busy exchanging evil grins, and Skitty was biting her lip, probably wondering if her words would have any effect. She would have to work on that; if more and more bad and aggressive Pokémon really were showing up, then talking to them wouldn't do shit all. It hadn't done anything for what we had to face on our way here, and they were pitifully weak.

"Treasure, you say?" Zubat licked his fangs, which actually sent a shiver down my spine. What? It looked fucking creepy! "So this thing is really valuable, h-"

It was at that point that I stopped listening.

I already knew where all of this was going. I'd seen it done heaps of times before, and all the situations were exactly like this one. Skitty had been given her chance to absolve this on her own, and if that didn't work, fine. Words had been useless on the streets, and 'unfair' was one such word.

So, my turn.

I'd gotten fairly good at Quick Attack on our way through the cave, and I gave zero warning before launching myself into one, sprinting from across the cavern to behind Zubat in about a quarter of a second and swinging my piece of Corsola for a home fucking run. He hadn't even seen me coming, too busy chuckling along with his bulbous buddy about how funny it was to take rocks from people.

Dumbasses. Letting their guards down, even after we'd come in after them. Had they not had to face the same hordes of Pokémon? Did they somehow not know what we'd blasted our way through, more or less uninjured?

Zubat bounced across to the wall, his wings bent at strange angles and his body covered in scraped from the numerous stones littering the sandy ground. I didn't bother stopping to watch the progress of my actions, pushing myself into another Quick Attack and belting it towards the wall.

This was one of the best things I'd discovered about that move. I didn't slow down as the wall came rushing forwards to meet me, no, I jumped towards it, landing feet first and carrying my momentum upwards. As I transitioned from the wall to the ceiling, what had become the ground beneath my feet shook slightly, letting me infer enough to guess that Zubat's impromptu flight had just ended.

Fine by me. Koffing had turned around, staring at the prone form of his friend on the opposite side of the room. I pushed myself from the roof, sending myself towards his unguarded back like a cobalt missile from the outer regions of violent damnation.

People always told me that I got kind of poetic before I bashed some fucker's brains in. Coincidentally, if Koffing did have a brain, I'd probably just bashed it in. My certified combat stick came down upon him with as much force as my body could generate, which was probably somewhere around a metric fuckton.

He went about two meters into the sand, and he would probably be staying there for a while. I sent a smug smile over my shoulder towards Skitty, who hadn't moved from her spot, before launching into yet another Quick Attack and making my way over to Zubat.

Look, Quick Attack was pretty fucking useful, alright? Why shouldn't I use it as much as I wanted, I didn't see any speed limit signs.

Zubat was groaning as I rocked up, the lump he'd grown from my strike looking like a second head. Koffing's satchel lay beside him, and I reached out to snoop through it, my hand stalling before it could touch it.

Come to think of it…

Shrugging, I picked the satchel up, inspecting it briefly before swinging it onto my shoulder. It was remarkably clean, considering where it had been until recently, but more importantly, it was now mine.

Zipping the pocket that felt the hardest open, I pulled out Skitty's treasure, glancing at the design with mild interest. It was kind of pretty, in a rock sort of way. It also wasn't nearly as heavy as I figured it would be, and I was still lifting it up and down with a raised eyebrow as I made my way over to Skitty.

"So what now?" I inquired, passing her the stone and letting out a small smirk at her slack jawed expression.


	2. Chapter 2

I don't know if I trusted Wigglytuff or not.

There was no indication for if I was supposed to find him weird as fuck or not. Chatot, the stupid feathery prick, seemed awfully resigned about the whole experience, and Skitty seemed so awed about the entire thing that I was now convinced that she couldn't actually open her eyes.

Judging from her expression, if she could, they would be filled with stars. Though maybe I should go back a little and explain just how I'd gotten here, huh?

Getting out of Beach Cave hadn't really presented much of a problem, and it hadn't taken any more than five minutes. We probably could have managed it in three, but Skitty had been a bit concerned about the two thugs that had tried to steal her shit, and in the end had managed to convince me to carry them out.

Thankfully, nothing tried to start anything as we made our way through, properly cowed by our initial rampage. Well, thankfully for the two… Pokémon (that would take some getting used to) that had become my luggage, because I really had no compunctions against using them both as clubs if things got a little dicey. It was with a little too much enthusiasm that I dumped both of their bodies off to the side of the beach as soon as we emerged from the cave, taking a moment to make sure there wasn't anything else to loot from either of them before going over to join up with Skitty.

She hadn't said anything about my more… unethical habits, which was fairly perceptive of her. She'd probably figured that I'd just grown up in a shitty neighbourhood, filled with all those gangs of aggressive Pokémon I'd heard so much about. I saw no reason to tell her that I was actually a human, mainly because I hadn't even seen another human yet and I wasn't sure they even existed here. Besides, if that was what she had been thinking, then she was close enough anyway.

I sure as fuck hadn't seen it coming when she asked me to join up with her, and become an explorer. With the way she went on about it, I figured that exploring was probably kind of important here, and there was no point in saying that I was intrigued. What really sold me on the idea, though, was just the _way_ she spoke about her Relic Fragment.

She wanted to figure out where it fit in the world. She wanted to find its place. I got the feeling that she was projecting onto the stone a little, but that didn't really matter to me. She had a dream, and even though it was so damn simple, just the _way_ she spoke about it…

It impressed the fuck out of me, and I wasn't very easily impressed. So if I could help her, and it gave me something to do whilst I tried to figure out just what the fuck had happened to me, I didn't really see much point in declining. Besides, exploring sounded like it could be fun, and I might as well learn everything I could about this place while I was here. I was either stuck here forever and would need the knowledge eventually, or just wasting time before I went back, so I may as well start being productive.

Getting into the Guild (and holy shit this Wigglytuff guy had a big head) had been… annoying, really. Skitty got through the ID process just fine, but…footprints? Seriously? Why did nothing in this fucking world make any sense? Anyway, after Skitty it had been my turn to stand on the grate, and that was when things started going a little downhill.

"Just so you guys know," I'd shouted down the grate, ignoring the squeak of fear from Skitty. She really needed to chill out, damn. "I'm apparently a Riolu."

"We'll decide for ourselves, thank you!" Came the voice that asked for confirmation, rather than the voice that had initially identified Skitty. And fuck, even though it was a fair distance away, that guy was loud.

"You trust my feet more than you trust me?" I shouted back, ignoring the urge to step off the grate. I wasn't really too thrilled at the idea of some other guy stroking himself to my feet, you know? Especially a guy who could be that loud, I didn't need that sort of shit in my life. "Yeah, whatever, you fucking weirdo!"

OK, so I never mentioned that I'd started it, but that's not important. All that was important was that it degenerated from there, and the resulting shouting match could probably be heard from that town that I could see down the hill. It only got worse after Lung's partner couldn't tell right off the bat what sort of Pokémon I was, which was somehow my fault.

Yeah, sorry that my species is so rare. You know, the species that could have easily just all died from disease or poaching and you would never know about it, because you already admitted that there weren't too many of them around. Maybe they were just in some other country so they could avoid your fucking species.

Not too many of me around, huh? Lemme just go get my harem and fucking rectify that, shall I? Dumbass.

The gate opened eventually, and I do fucking mean eventually, letting me and Skitty in. I've got to hand it to her, she didn't let it show too badly that she was absolutely mortified, just slightly embarrassed by my insistence of causing drama before we even got into the building. A few Pokémon gave us a look when we entered the room, glancing away quickly as I sent a sneer in their general direction.

I wasn't too interested in any of them, seeing as any one of them could have been the dipshit I was just dealing with. Understandably, I wasn't too keen on making friends just yet.

And then Chatot… oh my fucking God, Chatot. Where do I begin? Where _can_ I begin? His high and mighty attitude, his complete disregard of Skitty's feelings, or his insistence on trying to suck the Guild Master's dick with that curved beak of his?

OK, sure, he hadn't actually made an effort (yet, and he better not have while I was in the room), but you could see the desire in his eyes.

Oh, and his utter inability to identify sarcasm. Sure, technically, I _did_ steal my new bag, but the proper response would have been to roll his eyes at my blatant tone when I admitted that, _not_ call a full Guild lockdown and attempt to tackle me to the ground.

Between the lectures on respecting your betters and the thorough searching of my general person (I'd threatened the first 'Mon that started towards Skitty with a Force Palm to the dick if he touched her, and surprisingly they'd all listened), that hadn't been a fun hour. But finally, fucking finally, we'd gotten down to the bottom floor of the Guild, and the first thing Chatot decided to do was scold Skitty for a perfectly reasonable and logical observation like the utter prick he was proving himself to be.

…Fine. I'd only known her for a few hours at best, but I admit that I was a little overprotective of Skitty. How could I not be, we'd kicked so much ass together in that cave that I just felt some sort of connection, one that I don't remember ever feeling in all twenty three years of my life. Every time a sound would come out of Chatot's throat, and Skitty would wilt under his unnecessary harshness, I felt the overwhelming urge to just tear off his stupid beak and stab him in the eye with it.

Well, if that was happening already after a few hours, then I was fucked if I ever had to leave. Like a mother forced to leave behind her baby, or an asshole from the gritty gutters of the city forced to give up the only shining beacon that had ever been aimed in his direction, albeit accidentally.

Huh, I wonder who the fucker who was about to get his brain bashed in was? Personally, my money was on Chatot.

But then, just as my impression of this place could sink even further below the deep blue, something miraculous happened.

The guy in charge turned out to not be an asshole. I know, I was shocked too. Like, whaaaaa…? That's how shocked I was.

My first thought on Wigglytuff was that the guy must have been higher than a cloud. He was just so damn happy, and I don't know about him, but that wouldn't have been my default setting if I was forced to deal with Chatot on a day to day basis. But as he danced around the room, even pausing at one point to lead Skitty around in a simple little two-step, it slowly dawned on me that I couldn't smell anything out of the ordinary in the room, and my new nose was pretty damn sensitive.

So either Wigglytuff had managed to find a vein underneath all that… fur? Fat? Whatever the Hell it was, and shove a needle into it with those oven mitts he called arms, or that's just how he was. I couldn't honestly figure out which one it was, but ultimately, I decided that he must have had something hold the needle for him as he ran into it.

It was the only possible explanation.

And so, that led me to now, blatantly ignoring the sour looks Chatot would send me every now and then as I waited for Wigglytuff to stop fucking around and actually make this visit worthwhile. Sure, Skitty looked like she was enjoying herself almost as much as he was, but there must have been something around here that was more interesting than this. Also, Wigglytuff's dancing sucked, but I wasn't about to tell him that. Let him have his dreams, because who knows, maybe with Chatot being around all the time they were all he had.

Yeah, I didn't like Chatot very much. Can you really blame me? The guy was horrible at first impressions.

"So what will your team name be?" Wigglytuff asked out of the blue, finishing his whatever-the-fuck-it-was lap around the room and coming to a stop in front of us. Skitty probably would have blinked at the question if she had eyes, turning to face me as I just chose to sprout possibly the stupidest thing I've ever said in my whole life.

"We have to name ourselves? For fuck sakes, fine." Scrubbing a hand over my face, I went through any possible name I could think of, which wasn't anything at all until something hit me from fucking nowhere.

"Poképals."

Even just thinking back on saying that name, I have to swallow down bile. What was I thinking, you may ask? Ah ha, trick question! Obviously, I fucking WASN'T!

Skitty liked it, though. Wigglytuff possible did too, but his dancing could really mean anything at this point. If it's any consolation, I did see Chatot roll his eyes with what I presume to be disgust from the corner of my vision.

It's no consolation whatsoever, but fuck me, right? Before I could backpedal away from the decision with the tail between my legs, Wigglytuff started to do his little jig again, shouting, "registering!" repeatedly over my bleak attempts of finding something to change it to.

"No, wait, how about something else like-"

"Registering!"

"Damn it, what about Shredders or Psychos 4 Hire or-"

"REGISTERING!"

Eventually, and I do mean eventually, I figured that we weren't getting out of there any time soon, and Wigglytuff held far more patience than I did. Armed with the knowledge that I now belonged to something with the word 'pals' in it, as well as a fancy box that Skitty seemed enamoured with, we were set free into the wild of Wigglytuff's Guild, with nothing but our own devices to entertain ourselves.

Come to think of it, I hadn't seen anything that looked like it ran on electricity. My heart only broke a little bit when I realised that meant none of the more fun things in life, but that was easy enough to get over. I'd never had easy access to electronics in the last decade or so anyway, so it wasn't like I would be unable to adjust.

"So what should we do now?" Skitty had followed me out of the room, using her tail to adjust the bow that she'd clipped just below her ear. It suited her, which was good, because there was no chance in Hell that I would ever wear it. I was far happier with my ascot looking thing, it made me look fancy.

That's what I was telling myself, at least. I'd not come across a mirror yet.

I blew a breath through my nose as I surveyed the lower level of the Guild, which was mostly empty. For somewhere that's apparently world famous, you'd expect for there to be more people interested in being part of the proceedings here. Eh, whatever, it'd take more than that to force me to care.

"Let's go meet everyone." I suggested, loosening the… what had Wigglytuff called it? Oh, yeah, it was a Power Band. Sure didn't look like a band, but then again, I sure didn't look very human right now. Again, that's what I was telling myself, I'd not come across a mirror yet.

Skitty agreed to my idea, and the sun was just starting to disappear under the horizon as we set off. The Guild itself wasn't too large, and there were signs to point out what was important to us. The first person thing we ran into was a guy who called himself Loudred, who I recognised as the guy I'd threatened to Force Palm in the dick earlier.

Yeah, he didn't like me too much. Which is cool, because I may have called him a mouth-breathing foghorn before parting ways. Dude screamed right in my face for no reason, I tell you, you think I'd take that sort of shit lying down?

Hell, at least Croagunk could read the situation. He'd told me his name after I'd told him mine, and after a moment of awkward silence, he'd very slowly turned around to stare at the cauldron at the back of his little store place thingy.

My kind of greeting. Quick, easy, relatively painless.

Sunflora… the less said, the better. That sort of abrupt dismissal was kind of unfair, I know, but it's not like I was very concerned for her feelings. I was here for Skitty only, and her chipper attitude was both overwhelming and irritating. Eek! Like, oh my gosh, shut the fuck up.

She was friendly, probably too friendly, in all honesty. But she'd been happy to show Skitty around and introduce her to everyone else. I didn't really care for the look she threw over her shoulder at me as they walked away, I already knew I hadn't exactly made the best first impression. Probably thought I would be corrupting Skitty's young mind with my mere presence or something.

Hah! Skitty hadn't ever even seen someone passed out on the beach. As far as I was concerned, she needed me and my worldly knowledge.

Corphish was pretty plain, which was actually refreshing. I would take plain over something stupid looking screaming in my face day in and day out. Chimecho had been perfectly polite, as if I hadn't made a massive scene as soon as I arrived. In fact, she seemed intent on trying to give me advice, and had even adjusted my ascot for me, straightening it up a little.

She reminded me of those stereotypical mothers that you would see on T.V sometimes. You know, the annoying ones that writers seem to mistake for funny constantly. I fully expected a laugh track to start playing after she told me to "turn my frown upside down."

Yeah, she actually said that. What the fuck is wrong with this place, you may ask? Well, first and foremost, everyone seemed to be an animal of some sort, and only a handful had shown themselves to actually be semi-intelligent. In case you're wondering, I'm not including Loudred in that group. I'm still trying to get his saliva out of my fur.

Bidoof was actually my favourite of the bunch. The kid seemed completely terrified of me, and I couldn't tell if it was because he was a Normal Type and I was supposedly a Fighting Type, which is apparently a good matchup for me, or because he'd been very close to the firing line earlier on in the day. I think what I liked about him the most is that he would always flinch whenever I blinked, and I could have sworn I heard him running away when I turned my back, which brought me a few good chuckles.

Was I being mean? Fuck yeah I was, I'm not too blind to realise that. But in my defense, he'd actually started out our conversation with, "howdy," and I hate everyone who uses that word unironically. That's, like, a rule of life.

So I was also projecting a little. I'm a Riolu now, I get to live a little.

I didn't end up finding anyone else who was apprenticing at the Guild during my little search. There were plenty of other Pokémon around, but seeing as I wasn't going to be sharing my living quarters with them, I couldn't care less. I did get a few of their names, usually whenever I got suckered into a conversation with one of them, but that didn't really happen too often.

Mainly because I wasn't above walking away when someone was talking to me, and everyone here seemed to be so sickeningly polite that they couldn't do shit about it. It was legitimately bizarre, like they'd never come across bad manners before.

At least, that's what I thought, until the dinner bell rang. I'd been climbing down to the lower levels of the Guild when Chimecho set the thing off, and I was literally thrown to the bottom by the stampede of every apprentice enrolled in the Guild. I managed to land on my feet, thankfully, and by the time I'd gathered a few good choice words to throw around, the last tail had already disappeared into the one room of the Guild I hadn't thought to explore.

So I did just that. And let me tell you, I saw some shit.

Now, where I came from, dinner translated to the largest meal of the day. You'd stack up a plate, maybe sit in front of the telly, or at a table with the rest of your family if you were weird, and you'd enjoy your food with a smattering of conversation throughout. You know, civilised and all that crap.

I thought I'd seen everything after I ended up on my own. Sometimes I would still recall that time when I came across two rats fighting over a few crumbs, until one of the rats broke the other's neck, smacked its head against the wall beside them a few times, and started snacking on its brain. I'd never stepped on another tail ever again after that display.

So I'd seen eating, and I'd seen chaos. But what I'd just walked in on? This was fucking anarchy.

Food was flying everywhere. I got hit in the fucking eye with some sort of berry as soon as I poked my head in. Wigglytuff was off in his own world, as per usual, bouncing an apple off the top of his head whilst mid dance. Every time it hit his head, a new bite mark appeared somewhere on its skin, and would you believe that that was the most normal thing that met my eyes?

Loudred was off at the far side of the table, a massive wooden pole sticking his mouth open. His arms weren't long enough to pull it out, so he was currently smacking his chin against the edge of his seat, desperate to shatter the thing. Beside him was someone that I'd never seen before, a brown jelly bean looking thing that was buried in the ground, smacking its head against the plate before it with reckless abandon. With every slam of its skull against the wood, the bowls of food would get closer, and with every centimetre covered, the head-butting grew all the more frenzied.

Beside that were three slightly bigger clones, who were copying its actions in perfect unison. Corphish sat beside them, a crazed gleam in his eye and an apple in his claw. He was waving the thing around like a madman, and even as I watched, the ever calm and polite Chimecho grabbed onto the apple with her mouth, tearing it and the claw from his body with a feral growl and swallowing them with a greedy slurp.

A brand new claw emerged from Corphish's stump, sending some sort of juice flying across the table and onto the back of Sunflora's head. I won't even pretend for a second that I have any fucking clue what she was doing, all I could tell was that she was face down in a plate of berry paste, and she wasn't moving at all. Bidoof was next to her, chewing on one of the leaves that was sprouting from her side with an insane gleam in his eyes, and Chatot was flying above the whole mess, shrieking and swiping food from the table every now and then and deftly avoided all attempts to knock him back to the ground.

Oh, and Skitty was somewhere in that whole mess too, yowling and hissing and flinging more food than what ended up in her mouth.

My eyes moved down to the edge of the table, landing on the only person there who was eating with some semblance of normalcy. Croagunk stared right back into my eyes, chewing whatever was in his mouth slowly even as something crashed into the table beside him. Food went flying everywhere, and with a simple flourish, my fellow Fighting Type slapped an airborne apple in my direction, the fruit making it through the din by the skin of its… skin.

I swiped it out of the air as it tried to jet past my ear, giving it a cursory glance over. It looked pretty clean, which was really all I could ask for. Not as big as some of the others on the table, but my appetite was pretty tiny regardless. Raising the red globe in a toast, my lips twisted into a sardonic smirk as Croagunk repeated my action with a berry of his own, before I turned away from the anarchy and made my way to the room that Chatot had shown me and Skitty to earlier.

On the way, I took a bite from the apple, almost gagging as the taste hit my tongue.

Fuck that was sweet!


	3. Chapter 3

This settled it. This place was fucking insane.

Last night been at all uneventful, after the fiasco that had been… I'm not really sure what I could call those events that had come to pass. 'Dinner' would possibly work as a sort of umbrella term, but every time I actually tried to come up with some sort of label, my mind would just kind of start screaming and never stop. So, for now, dinner would have to do.

After the fiasco that had been… dinner, I'd managed to fall asleep fairly easily. The straw that made up my bed made me had made me feel kind of like a barnyard animal, but. . . I really don't have anything else to say about that, it just did. I didn't hear Skitty come in to join me before Lalaland claimed me as one of its own, so I do remember my last thought being that maybe she'd accidentally wound up on the wrong side of a plate, which was maybe as funny as it was horrifying.

Hey, I'd lived through last night, I knew what these savages were capable of!

Morning hadn't really been too much of a thrill either, not that it ever was. I wasn't forced awake by the obnoxious twittering of all the birds in the world sitting on my face, which was nice. Though now that I was in this world and all of the birds were people… ow, headache. Anyway, not important, Skitty had been determined to sleep the rest of the day away, given that all of my attempts to rouse her ended in failure.

That is, until I decided to flip her mattress.

Hey, this exploring gig was her idea, I wasn't about to let her be late for our first day. I could hear an assortment of noises from all over the Guild, with a remarkably low amount of complaints considering the sun was barely in the sky. Apparently these explorer people were fond of that adage about sleeping early or whatever, the sun had still been in the sky when they had all been… I don't want to say eating, but I really don't care enough to go off on another mental tangent that'll end with me unearthing a title. The last time I tried that, I got 'PokéPals'.

Fuck. I just reminded myself of that name. Ugggghhhhhhhh…

Time hadn't passed nearly quick enough for my liking after that point. I'd been halfway through picking Skitty up off the ground when Loud Head slammed his way into our room, the air in his lungs sort of just leaving him when he realised we were both awake. At that point, we'd stared at each other awkwardly for a few seconds, before he huffed and turned around, looking particularly sulky as he muttered something about early risers.

So… was _he_ the alarm clock? Yeah, great. Just had to find some way of interjecting his dumb ass into my life somehow, didn't ya?

Who am I talking to? I don't know. Whatever's responsible for sending _my_ dumb ass here to join a cult, let's go with that.

And oh boy, was this place culty. Well, as a whole, it wasn't too bad, but who was the one to come up with that morning cheer? 'Don't shirk your work', yeah, I can see where that one is coming from. 'Smiles go for miles'? That kind of crosses the line from realistic to idealistic, and really, can't you see the cult leader saying that right before they all chug down whatever liquid they've chosen to dilute their cyanide in? And don't even get me started on 'Run away and pay'. Run away from what? Why is it so frowned upon for me to retreat? What are _you_ running away from when you tell me that I'll pay for running away, morning cheer?

But none of that, I repeat, none of that, could ever hope to measure up to the insanity that just entered my ears.

"Wait, hold on, back up a sec here." Chatot's beak clicked shut, the bird shooting me an annoyed glance as I cut into his string of exposition. My arms were up in the air, my paws splayed out in the universal signal of 'hold the fucking phone'. "Are you telling me that time, _TIME_ , that thing that can be deconstructed into seconds, minutes, and hours; that can and will go on forever and never at the same time, and which has absolutely no physical presence whatsoever, is being fucked up?"

Chatot clicked his tongue, flicking his wings about in agitation. At least, that's what I assume it was. Maybe he was just hungry or something and that's how his body tells him. "I'm not sure that your labels are correct, but yes, time is in essence being… messed up."

"Ah." Was all I said, lowering my arms and quietly accepting that little tidbit about the world as fact.

…For all of two seconds.

"WHAT THE FLYING FUCK!" If it were any other situation, I probably would have been laughing my ass off at the sight of Chatot losing his balance and falling flat on his face, but I was understandably a little bit too surprised for that. "You…this…it…what…TIME!?"

My face fell into my paws at that point, and the only reason I knew Chatot was staring at me as though I was an idiot is because Skitty told me about it later. Full sentences were a little bit beyond my control at that moment, so when Chatot cleared his throat, I just blindly waved for him to continue.

"…Yes, time." Was he not expecting my response or something? No, wait, it's totally cool, it's not like I was just told that fucking TIME was in jeopardy or something. A horrible thought flashed through my mind at that moment, and out of reflex I shut it down almost instantaneously (PokéPals… I hate myself). No, I wasn't some sort of fated hero set to save a world I had never even heard of before. They found some way to get themselves into this mess, I wasn't getting them out of it. I goddamn refuse.

…Shit. Somehow, I knew that I would end up having to just go with it. I'm pretty sure you can't swim against a river's current, and by this point I'd gone over at least five waterfalls.

Can Riolu even swim? Hell if I know.

"As I was saying, this malfunction of time has possible resulted in an increase in the number of bad Pokémon, as well as the number of mystery dungeons." At that point, I'd lifted my head up again, scoffing dismissively as Chatot closed off his little speech. There was that term again, 'bad Pokémon'. Not 'scared and lashing out due to fear' or 'confused and left in the dark about whom is friend or foe' or something else along those lines. How very colour coded for your convenience.

Chatot seemed a little miffed with my blatant dismissal, huffing and turning to stare at the board he'd parked himself in front of. Oh, good, the Guild's head of intelligence _could_ learn. Skitty turned to me with a bright grin, which I would have called infectious had I not been immune to such things.

"So, Luke, a mystery dungeon is-"

"Let me guess, it's a mysterious dungeon?" Skitty tilted her head to the side, before nodding slowly. Even if I couldn't even tell if she was looking at me, I could easily identify the look she was giving me.

"Why do I get the feeling that everyone thinks I'm an idiot?" I muttered to myself, my gaze drifting back to Chatot as he turned back around, a poster in his…wings. Before I could get the chance to ask him how the fuck he was doing that, he'd thrust it underneath my nose, his demeanour suggesting that he'd rather be doing literally anything other than standing in front of me right now.

Rolling my eyes, I took the poster from him, my entire body freezing when I took in the first word. At least, I assumed it was a word. In the top corner was a picture or some sort of ball that I'd never seen before, with symbols running along the rest of the lines adorning the page. The closest I could compare them to would probably be hieroglyphics, which really did me a fat lot of good because I didn't know how the fuck to even start reading hieroglyphics.

Naturally, my first assumption was that it was a poorly though out prank.

"…I can't read this."

Chatot blinked, his head tilting to the side and his eyes narrowing slightly. He actually genuinely looked baffled by my proclamation.

"You… can't read?" Wait… was that pity? Oh, cool, this wasn't actually a prank, this was completely legit. I still don't know which one was worse.

"Of course I can fucking read! The Hell even is this… are these footprints?" Flipping the poster upside down, I squinted at the first symbol on the page, before giving up with a groan and handing it off to Skitty's waiting paw. I suppose on some level, footprints made some semblance of sense, seeing as I'd seen maybe three Pokémon that would have been able to hold a pen, but…footprints?

A tired groan escaped my lips as I shook my head, doing my best to ignore the strange look Chatot was sending me whilst Skitty read the letter aloud, probably for the benefit of my apparently illiterate ass. Already, I could tell today was going to suck.

 **XxX**

"Hi, my name's Spoink. I was just taking a little walk through the fucking wilderness when I dropped the pearl that apparently means more to me than life itself, because I'm an enormous asshole. Hah, whoops, go fetch it for me, bitches!"

The Lileep I was busy strangling with one hand sent me an odd look, though it could have easily been a result of my twig impacting between its eyes for the sixth time. An angry clicking noise erupted from somewhere below me, and two tentacles managed to whip me just below the eye before I broke my piece of Corsola over its head.

Damn Rock Types, their skulls were so fucking hard. Still, that just made it all the more satisfying when they eventually caved, even if it had to be at the expense of my precious stick. I'd been planning on making that my trademark.

I tried to shake some of the water out of my fur as I stepped to the side in response to Skitty's hasty warning, all of my efforts going to waste as a Shellos came pelting through the air where my head had been. Fucker must have been approaching Mach speeds, yet it still managed to find time to spray some water directly up my nose before adding a new corridor to the annoying labyrinth we'd spent the last half hour in.

Skitty came jogging to where I was busy attempting to snort everything that had down into my lungs back out through my nose, her fur about three times wetter than mine. Funnily enough, the Drenched Bluff was sort of wet, and the puddles went further than the light could follow them. Somehow, despite my advantage of eyeballs, I was always the one to fall into them, and Skitty would never pause to think twice before jumping in after me.

Even though I could, you know, swim.

Skitty gave me a sheepish smile as I picked up both halves of my stick, remaining silent as we both turned around and continued to descend into our freshest circle of Hell. Today just wasn't a talking kind of day, and the spaces between Skitty's usual quiet and my trying to figure out just how the fuck time could just stop working all of a sudden were usually filled with short scuffles and shouted warnings.

Something rustled behind some of the sparse undergrowth that had somehow managed to survive in this environment, and without bothering to turn around, I sent the sharpest end up one broken half of my stick flying towards it like a javelin. A deep grunt of pain echoed from some ways away, and the other half of my stick joined the first one a second later.

"So, uh, Luke." I glanced over my shoulder, waiting for Skitty to stop eyeing the bush I'd used to dispose of my stick. Well, she may have been looking at the blue puddle that was slowly spreading out from it. Eyeing in this case was being used as a figurative term, of course.

…One of these days, I would have to find out how she managed to get around so efficiently.

"Mm?"

"Back when we were at the Guild, did you…" Skitty stopped walking, which prompted me to stop venturing further as she turned to stare at the side of the small room we'd found ourselves in. Over her shoulder, I noticed a Chingling floating into the room, holding back a snort as I silently drew a line across my throat with my finger and sent it running with its non-existent tail between its legs. Apparently, the 'Bad Pokémon' can learn.

"Were you just messing with Chatot, or can you really not read?"

"I can read just fine." Honestly, I was kind of surprised. I'd been expecting the question for a while now, but given how cripplingly shy Skitty was, I guess it made sense that she would keep me waiting. I would have to start working on breaking her out of that, because there was no way I could lead this team forever. I didn't know anything about this place, and the language they wrote in was just a sudden reminder of that.

My foot impacted a twig, which I snatched up with a burst of a Quick Attack before it could get out of reach. The ground was mostly made up of mud, I acknowledged idly as I began to scrawl letters into it, and this was probably the only moment in my life when that would be useful.

I saw Skitty's ear flick as I cursed under my breath, hastily wiping away the dot I'd stabbed above the 'I' before standing up. The word below us looked like it had been written by a three year old, but I doubted that would matter in the long run.

"It's just that I use actual letters."

Skitty stared down at her own name, complete with a smudge of dirt traveling from above the 'I' and through the 'K', as well as a small rivulet of water that I'd accidentally run into like a moron and had been forced to let cut the 'Y' in half, lest I lost the entire word and had to start over.

"I don't understand that." If it were anyone else, I would have suspected that I'd just been insulted, but I don't actually think Skitty had the capacity to hurt someone else's feelings. I couldn't wait for the day when she grew out of that, it was going to be so much fun.

"Exactly." I smiled and slung my new stick over my back, doing my best to ignore the fact that I may have just sprayed my back with mud. It was on the third step I took that something slammed into my foot, and I looked down just in time to watch as a pale sphere flew over the edge of the ravine that I would have sworn hadn't been there a second ago.

Skitty jogged up to join me, and together we glanced over the edge. After a few more seconds of unanimous staring over into a dark abyss, the tell-tale noise of something landing echoed back up to us, sounding more and more like laughter the further it got from our ears.

"…Was that…?"

"…If it was, I'm going to fucking kill myself."

 **XxX**

" _Excuse_ me?"

Chatot's beak clicked shut, his previous joy evaporating away in a heartbeat. He looked a little scared, and I have a feeling that if I could have seen myself in that moment, I probably would have been as well.

I mean, I'd seen a few things in my time, sure. But I'd never had a guy who was covered in mud and water, with bloodshot eyes and glowing fists pissed off at me. And I'd certainly never had a guy who was covered in mud and water, with bloodshot eyes and glowing fists pissed off at me right after I'd taken away most of his hard earned money.

Skitty moved away from me as soon as I began to move forwards, which in hindsight, really was the first sign.

"Let me get this straight." Chatot hopped backwards as I took a step forward, his eyes daring about. Seeing as he was the Guild's head of intelligence, he was probably trying to do the smart thing and look for an escape. Clever, because until I knew the laws of this land, there was very little chance that I wouldn't strangle him right at that moment. "We crawl through mud, water, and whatever the fuck kind of plants are growing down in that hellhole, looking for a pearl that some dipshit dropped when he _shouldn't have even been there in the first place_ \- don't you give me that look, there were fucking _signs_ all over the place, which he would have seen if he had his eyes open, and you _fucking know it_! We have to beat the shit out a whole squadron of rocks and climb down a God damn _ravine_ to get the mother fucking thing, and not only am I stopped from beating his brain-dead ass like a fucking tambourine for all the shit he put us through, _**UNNECESSARILY**_ , but our fucking cut is only TEN PERCENT!?"

By that point, I think the entire room had gone silent, and all of them were staring at me. I wasn't really paying attention, most of my focus being on the guy that I had backed against a wall, as well as marvelling at just how loud I'd managed to get my voice. Had I just unconsciously used a move or something?

That question was pretty much thrown out of my mind the next second, because something… really damn weird happened in those next few seconds.

See, I'd always been a bit of a brash prick. I'd never really questioned it, because I either didn't have time or I didn't care enough. But within that moment of silence, something figuratively hit me, something that snapped me right out of my mood and made my lips slowly curl down from their scowl.

I could see Chatot's fear. No shit, I could see something from inside his body, and whatever fucked up shape it was taking, it was a representation of his fear. As for how I managed to see it, I don't think I could find the words to tell you. It was all instinct or something, and after the initial 'what the fuckery' of that experience had passed, I just suddenly felt very tired of the situation.

I was scaring what was now my colleague into a corner over what could easily have been five bucks, for all I know. He'd probably not even done any wrong; I was part of an organisation now. An organisation that supplied work and food, and now that I thought about it, hadn't once brought up the idea of rent. No matter how little faith I had in the individual members, I don't think all of them would have neglected to mention that even once. So a large amount of my pay was deducted, so what? They gave me a roof over my head and food to eat, and I didn't have to fork out any money for anything that I didn't want to buy for myself.

I understood nothing about this world, and that sentiment could expand to Chatot as well. Who knows, maybe my assumption was correct, and my distaste was reciprocated tenfold, but right now I had his back against a wall and an attack literally in my hands. It wasn't like I was _going_ to launch it; it was just unconsciously _there_ to respond to my anger, but Chatot didn't know that. From his point of view, I was on the stage right before throwing a Force Palm into his face, and nobody was stepping in to help him, all spectating from afar due to my almost palpable rage. And what was it over? A bit of cash and a difficult day.

The cherry on top was that I never would have noticed, if in that split second, I hadn't glimpsed his fear. Because I'd been in this situation loads of times before, on both sides, sometimes in the same week. I didn't just know how he would have been feeling, I had seen it too, but I'd been _this_ close to choosing the easy path and ignoring it. I'd been thoughtless enough to scream at a guy who had been empathic enough to pity me once he'd learned that I was illiterate.

…I'd only been here a day, and already the views I'd developed throughout my life were being challenged. And for good reason too, I wasn't on the streets anymore. I couldn't just go around acting like it, that was unfair for everyone else.

The anger drained away almost instantaneously, leaving behind… I guess 'a void' is the best way to describe the feeling. Without that anger, I just felt empty. Tired. My eyes slid closed as all that spent emotion left my body in a sigh, and without saying a word, I turned back to the ladder leading out of the Guild, the glow in my hands fading as I tracked a new layer of mud onto the ground.

Nobody said a word as I climbed out of sight, and for that small mercy, I was grateful.

There was a lot I had to think about.

* * *

A/N: I'd always planned on the major development of this character of mine being based around Riolu's ability to see emotions, but I wasn't intending on that sort of realisation being this soon. However, when I was going through the game's events again, it just seemed like the perfect moment for it to happen. It's early enough for connections between characters to not be soured for the sake of unnecessary drama (which if you couldn't tell, I'm not fond of), and the sooner that happens, the sooner everyone can understand why Luke is an insufferable asshole and the sooner their reactions can be played for laughs (my strong point), rather than fuel for a rift to be formed. Besides, I know the first time I played through, I hated Chatot for taking most of the money for the job away, and I don't want him to be a villain in this. He's got his flaws (cough Team Skull cough), but he also has to look after _Wigglytuff_ , while basically micromanaging the entire Guild. I still do not _like_ Chatot by any means, but now I can respect all the work he would have to put in for that to happen, and given that this story is from the perspective of a young adult and not a child (like I was when I first played the game), I want to be able to convey that.

Is it too soon? That's very possible. I have no clear plan for this story, I just write out the events as they happen, and try to make them enjoyable to read. Plus, it's extremely fun for me. Will you see another note like this on the other chapters? That depends on if something happens within the story that I'm either not sure of, or I think requires a bit of context that wouldn't fit anywhere in the story. This is a little bit of both, actually.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: This is the result of three solid hours, six cans of alcohol (I'm not even tipsy, I demand a refund!) and the motivation of a new year rolling about. Happy 2016, everybody!

* * *

I think Skitty had once said that watching the sun set on this beach was one of her favourite things to do.

Let me tell you now, I can definitely see why.

I think the moon had been visible when I climbed out of the Guild, stepping around the grate and ignoring the cheerful greeting of some bird on my way down the cliff. I had been tempted to turn right at the crossroad at the bottom, but I had never been into town before, and some part of me didn't want to step foot there unless Skitty was right beside me.

So, I went down to where it had all started.

And the view was spectacular.

The water was as flat as I've ever seen the ocean, the many bubbles around the area catching the light of the setting sun like some low tech disco. The sun itself was dead centre, and if I didn't know any better, I would have assumed it was sitting on top of the water.

I almost tripped over as my foot entered the water, ungracefully stumbling backwards onto the mostly dry land. I made it about two steps back before realising that I couldn't actually remember the last time I had taken a bath, and decided that salt water was better than whatever I did smell like.

As I closed my eyes and felt the water go up and over my head, I finally allowed myself to think.

It was… surreal, you know? Not even a week ago, I'd been nothing, worth less than the dirt on the average citizen's shoe and worrying that this winter would be the one to finally end me. Now, here I was, diving below the waves of some beach I never would have known existed, trapped within the body of a small blue Fighting Type in a world where your next door neighbour could shoot fire from their eyeballs and still be considered boring.

That sort of transition wasn't something that could be waved away, no matter how… at home I felt right now. There was no denying that I was infinitely better off now than I had been; I hadn't coughed once since coming to this world, and now I had a home. And someone precious to me, I suppose, but right now the roof over my head was slightly more spectacular. Maybe my worldview was just too narrow, I don't know.

And nobody had _had_ to give that to me. They'd taken me in with… mostly open arms, and I had no delusions about where I would have ended up if they hadn't. Just another 'Bad Pokémon', with a particularly vulgar attitude and no special skills that would get me away from any exploration team that happened to come across me.

I'd probably scared Skitty. I'd likely scared Chatot. I'd definitely screwed any chance of being easily accepted into the fold of their special organisation. And there wasn't any question about whether I _wanted_ in or not, I was in already, with no evidence that I had anywhere to turn if they decided they wanted me out.

It was difficult to comprehend, the notion of having something to lose. Not that something, but a lot of somethings. I had Skitty, who I wouldn't dare let abandon her dream just because of my dumb ass. I had an income, which… could probably do something; I wasn't very well versed in the economy of this world, as you could probably tell.

I wish I could figure out why.

My breath finally running out, I pulled my head up and broke the surface of the water. I'd stayed fairly close to the shoreline, and I have no idea how long I'd been down there, but the sun was definitely lower than it had been when I'd dunked myself.

I tottered over to an outcrop of rocks that I'd passed before I'd actually stepped down onto any sand, my eyes tracing a random bubble as it floated amongst its kind. Why, _why_ was I even here in the first place? What purpose would bringing me here serve?

Hell, was there even a purpose? Maybe I'd just been a part of some military experiment, without even knowing it. There had always been rumours flying around when I was younger, but they'd kind of petered out until only the craziest would continue to spout them.

I wouldn't put it past that government, not after some of their other decisions, but what could their purpose have possibly been? See how many planets they could fling the hobo before his body completely froze?

I shook my head, flinging salt water in all directions. No, that was stupid, not worth wasting time thinking about.

Or is that what they wanted me to-!

I slapped myself across the face. Hard.

Ow. Ok, maybe… maybe I'd just accidentally stepped into one of those wormhole things while high. That sort of thing probably happened all the time, right?

No, wait, being high was already ruled out when I decided this was all real.

Damn it.

Heaving an explosive sigh, I let myself fall backwards, expecting to be staring up at some clouds as my back hit the stone. What I got instead was a face-to-face with a pair of eyes with tiny pupils, and a mostly gold face, leading off into some pale colour that I wouldn't have been able to name even if I wanted to.

Actually, fuck it. I wanted to name that colour. From now on this guy's lower portion was Jeremy. I want a t-shirt in Jeremy, I bet I'd look fetching.

…Forget it, that sounds too weird.

"Rock hard." Pinprick-Pupil's voice was about as stereotypical moron as you could possibly get. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another of his species blow another bubble across the water, which was the major factor in my decision to ignore what was apparently drool hanging from the corner of where his gold met his Jeremy.

Look, I don't know what that colour's called, alright? It was like white, but with a lesser gold mixed in. Wold? Ghite? That last one sounded like some sort of sophisticated swear word, I'd have to remember it if I ever happened across an aristocrat. Oh, you sodding old ghite wanker, you!

"Yes." I pushed myself back up with my elbows, shuffling around until I was facing whoever it was that I was talking with. Now, see, it's times like this when I had to question whether this was all real or not. "The rock is hard."

I'd somehow found myself dragged into a conversation with a crab. Who could have been making dick jokes for all I knew, and for some reason I didn't have the energy to just Quick Attack to a less populated portion of the beach.

"I like rock." I swear, you could hear the splash as the drool hit the rock below where… were his eyeballs working independently to one another? "And rock like Krabby."

Holy shit, they were.

See, this is why I didn't like meeting new people.

"Krabby, huh?" I decided against offering a handshake, Mainly because those claws could probably tear my limbs off. Or they could be made of Styrofoam for all I knew, I still wasn't going to test that theory. "I'm Luke."

"No, me Krabby." Krabby's eyelids gave a little wet clapping noise as he blinked, the rest of his body never moving. "You Luke."

I have no clue how long I held his stare. Maybe a minute. To be honest, up until the point where I slowly turned around, I was too sick of life to really say anything. The sun had almost finished its descent below the horizon at that point, and I sat there, impartial to the silence that had enveloped the two of us as Krabby moved to settle beside me.

I don't know how long we were there, just staring out over the waves. It could have been half an hour, or even the entire night. Stars were peeking out through the night sky as my ass slowly lost all feeling, but I paid no attention to any of it.

Instead, I thought.

I thought about my situation. I thought about my motivations. I thought about Skitty's motivations. I thought about why Wigglytuff, such an easy-going guy, would go through all the effort to have his face carved out of a mountain and painted. I thought about why everyone was so frenzied when dinner was presented. I thought about why Krabby hadn't gotten bored and left yet, once I came to realise there were no bubbles floating about any more.

Most of all, I thought about this chance that I had been given, and why I had received it.

And then I thought some more, about why I didn't yet have an answer.

And suddenly, it became clear to me.

There didn't really have to be one.

"Krabby?" We were both staring up at the sky at this point, and I let out a small breath as what I was seeing actually registered in my brain. Never, _ever_ , had I seen stars this bright.

It was beautiful.

"All of this... Is all of this real?"

Krabby didn't answer, not for a while. I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep until I heard his voice, far quieter than before.

"Krabby don't know. There air. There water. There sand. It real to Krabby, but if it not real to Luke, then who right? Maybe both us wrong."

I couldn't help it. I was just too startled by the answer.

I laughed. Long and loud into the night as I slumped down onto the rock and used it to keep my balance. I laughed until my lungs burned, and my arms wobbled beneath my weight, and all the while, neither of us took our eyes off the sky.

The slightest hints of sunlight were beginning to peek over the horizon by the time I climbed to my feet, teetering slightly as my legs got used to using their muscles once more.

"Thank you, Krabby." I murmured, my golden companion still having not moved an inch. I turned, searching for the incline that I had used to climb up the rock, pausing after my second step as Krabby's voice came echoing back to me.

"Luke is Krabby friend?"

I blinked twice, turning back around to face Krabby. His body was rotated slightly, his eyes fixed directly on my face.

Slowly, a smile, not even big enough to register as a smirk, spread across my face.

"Sure, Krabby." Surprisingly, I meant what I was saying. I turned back around, raising a paw in farewell as I hopped on the first rock in the decline and almost slipped. "I'm your friend."

 **XxX**

It still confused me as to why the Guild wasn't locked that night.

I wasn't really that tired as I made my way back up the cliff. There wasn't any sort of energy rushing through my body as I came up to the massive gate, no adrenaline that I could identify or tingles beneath my skin.

I was just… there. Existing. Not tired, not energetic, oddly not hungry even though I'd missed dinner by several hours. I probably would have been able to sleep if I had tried, but seeing as the night sky was slowly staining with orange light I didn't see the point.

I'm glad that the gate that been left open, though. Most likely for me, but the possibility that they'd just forgotten or it just wasn't procedure was still there. I just don't see Chatot leaving the Guild wide open for whoever wanted to get in at all hours in the morning. Not that I'm complaining, the chance of me getting murdered in my sleep just so I could get into the Guild this one time was worth it, up until I get murdered in my sleep, I guess.

At that point, it doesn't really matter, does it?

The Guild was eerily silent as I made my way through it. I stopped to check out the second board on the first floor while I had the chance, seeing as while lot of posters with what I could only assume to be mug shots littering the entire thing. Criminals to capture, maybe? Didn't this world have some sort of police force to handle that? Nobody was that disorganised, surely.

The second floor was just as bad as the first. Nobody around, and let me tell you, it was weird seeing that massive cauldron without Croagunk standing in front of it and laughing to himself. I was tempted to go over there and check it out, but the last thing I wanted to do was set off some kind of alarm, and Croagunk just seemed like the kind of guy who would booby-trap everything that could even be considered precious to him.

So here I was, alone in the Guild with an hour or so to kill. And I don't know what you would have decided to do, but I didn't think it would really be fair to run the risk of waking Skitty. Not when I had this wide open area to do something that I honestly should have done by now.

I concentrated for a moment, feeling my teeth elongate and sharpen in my mouth. I parted my lips, mainly to make sure I didn't cut myself, and held the Bite for a few more seconds before letting it drop.

It really was past time for me to catalogue all of my moves, and there was always the issue of my cornering while in Quick Attack. I reckon I could get it down to a tighter circle.

At that point it was becoming a habit, because I have no idea how long I spent there, going through all of my moves as quietly as I could. It couldn't have been any longer than an hour and a half, but there's no real way for me to keep track of it anyway.

I lit my eyes up with a Foresight, almost stumbling as the shadows were chased away. It wasn't as light as it would be come day time, but it was manageable, and I was way less likely to trip over something now. With a deep breath, I launched myself into a Quick Attack, going up the first wall I came across as turning to the side before I could journey onto the roof.

There's really no way to describe the feeling I got in my body as I cycled through the different energies that made up my moves, apart from instinct. They just had a different taste, a different feeling below the skin that could only translate to one thing.

Counter was close to the surface, but purposefully submerged. It was always there right after I'd taken a hit, and when the release was all said and done, it would retreat back, waiting for the next time it would be useful. Endure was something you could just feel in your bones, hardening your body to the point where you felt invincible. I wasn't dumb enough to go about claiming that I was, because that's how idiots got themselves shanked, but I definitely felt like I was made of harder stuff whenever I activated that.

As for Force Palm… chaos. Simply chaos; an assault on all the senses and a flood of undeniable power. It was my hardest way to hit so far, and it just felt like an attack that went further than the skin and bones of whoever was on the other side of it. I don't know, maybe I would have been able to describe it better if I had been on the receiving end of one first. Not that I would go out of my way for that to happen, of course.

A month ago, this would have been beyond my wildest dreams. Right now, I felt as though I'd only barely scratched the surface.

I had just completed my umpteenth circle around the room when I almost tripped, something foreign making itself known to me. It was exactly like what had happened with Chatot, except there was more confusion and far less fear. Something else was present, too, but I couldn't identify it before the feeling receded. Thinking back to that moment, I still can't figure out what that feeling was supposed to be.

With a pulse of energy, I pushed myself off the wall, landing on all fours mostly to make sure I didn't hurt myself. Glancing over the to the walkway I'd tried to stay away from the most, my gaze fell on Loudred, my head bobbing once in acknowledgement before I straightened up from my crouch.

"Time to wake up?" I asked, loud enough for him to hear. No need to disturb the others if he was just out to nab a midnight snack.

Loudred studied me for a moment longer, blinking in a way that looked both slow and deliberate.

"In a few minutes." He answered, in a voice so quiet that I would never have believed he were capable of it, had I not been there to witness it.

I nodded, glad to note that he didn't flinch or make any other movement as I stepped towards him. It still probably would have been funny in some perverse manner, just not right now.

"I'll go wake Skitty then."

Loudred continued to stare at me, much the same way that Krabby had earlier that morning, before shrugging and moving deeper into the room. Letting go of the breath that I hadn't even realised I was holding, I moved towards the corridor, stopping when a collection of bright colours shifted at the corner of my vision.

Chatot didn't look happy to see me. Or sad. Or angry. He just looked like he was stuck watching paint dry, or some other menial and pointless task. Finding him now was pretty much a stroke of luck, even if I didn't have anything planned to say at all.

"Chatot." I called out quietly, just as he turned away. His head cocked to the side, his body rotating slightly in my direction. I figured he was listening, and didn't allow myself any time to reconsider before ploughing on. I tried to ignore the fact that I could only assume that I now also had an audience, seeing as there was no longer any noise coming from where Loudred had wandered off to, and I didn't want to risk losing my nerve to check.

"Yesterday, there was no reason for what I did. I acted like… a child, I guess? There was no reason for it. I have a few excuses, but all I can say is that I'm sorry for what I did. It… it won't happen again."

I did my best to keep my eyes up, to not turn my head. I wanted him to know that I meant it.

"…The Guild Master and I had a discussion after you left, last night." Even in the silence of the room, Chatot's voice was deathly quiet. I felt like a child being scolded, though strangely enough, I didn't have to bite back some sort of snappish remark. The amount of faith I have in myself is unrivalled, I know. "We decided that if you were truly as volatile and unruly as you were proving yourself to be, it would be best if you were to leave effective immediately. The announcement was planned for this morning."

I tried not to clench my jaw as I broke off from staring at the back of Chatot's head. So I'd blown it. Not surprising, but disappointing all the same. Hopefully they'd at least allow me to say goodbye to Skitty before they threw me out. Something was telling me she'd need my foot up her ass to not lose motivation while chasing her dream.

"However." My head whipped back around, even as I told myself to not get my hopes up. Chatot was staring directly at me now, his gaze unnerving to say the least. "You have apologised, and proven me incorrect, so I will retract my decision for the time being. Do you understand what this means?"

Slowly, I nodded. These were big words. Good big words, and I should be thankful for them. Chatot's stare penetrated down to my very soul for a second longer, before he nodded slowly and turned back around.

"Morning Cheer is in five minutes, Luke." Wigglytuff was supposed to be a world famous explorer, right? And Chatot had been his partner? For the first time, even though I was just looking at his back, I could see just what that title meant, and where I stood in comparison. "I suggest you rouse your partner."


	5. Chapter 5

Skitty had to be the least graceful cat I've ever seen in my life.

To this day, I don't know how I managed to hold in my laughter as I crept into the room we shared, taking in her body stretched along the length of her bed. She had chosen, either consciously or in her sleep, to rest on her back, her front legs in the air and her head tilted at an angle that looked close to painful, her tongue lolling out to cover both her nostrils. As I stood there, my neck twitching painfully with mirth I was determined to keep caged, she let out a thunderous snore, her tongue flapping uselessly in the breeze she herself had created.

That was it. I was too weak to hold on. I toppled right over the edge, my hands on my knees in a feeble attempt to keep myself upright as I fucking howled.

Skitty shot up, and I have no idea how I managed to stay on my feet as she toppled right over the edge of her bed and landed on all four feet, her tail right up in the air and her head darting every which way.

She relaxed as soon as she turned to the doorway, even though she never once opened her eyes in that entire freakout.

"Luke?" One day, I _would_ figure out how she did that. I'd already had my mouth open to respond before she cut me off entirely, launching herself at me and forcing me to catch her mid-fucking-air. "I'm so sorry! I tried going after you, but Loudred said to give you some time, and then we had dinner and I tried to stay awake for you afterwards but I think I ended up falling asleep and why do you smell like the ocean?"

We probably made quite the spectacle, me standing there and blinking like an idiot, her in my arms with her head cocked to the side and her nose twitching. I wasn't entirely sure what part of that I was supposed to respond to first. The fact that she'd stayed up for me in the first place, the fact that she'd actually listened to Loudred, or the fact that out of everything to end her little ramble she'd chosen my scent.

The last one, I told myself sternly before I could form a sentence. Least likely route to offend, practice makes perfect.

"I went down to the beach to watch the sunset." It didn't even register that Skitty was still in my arms as I wandered back out of our room, my mind drifting back to everything that had happened in the last eight or however many hours. It had definitely been a wild ride, though that conclusion could only be the truth inside my own head. Sitting on a rock for hours on end wasn't exactly a sequence of events worthy of spectators, no matter how life changing. "I kind of lost track of time. I did make a new friend, though."

Skitty gave me a look that was all speculation. "You? A new friend?"

I glanced down at her as we passed the other two rooms in the corridor, shifting her weight around a little so I could wave idly at Corphish as I trudged past him. How that didn't tip me off to put Skitty down, I'll likely never know, but I could always just blame the fact that she'd never said anything, and she barely weighed anything anyway.

"Yes, me, a new friend." The mild offence in my tone did nothing to lower her eyebrow. "His name's Krabby, and…"

I trailed off, my mind pausing to seriously consider what I could say next. Skitty was kind of weird, and Krabby was definitely weird, and the two of them together would probably end up being either the most beautiful thing of the most downright fucking terrifying thing I would ever see in my life. There was literally no in between.

"…And, he's very interesting. I don't really know that much about him, though." The end of the corridor was just up ahead, and I'd only just looked up in time to catch Sunflora's odd look in our direction (I think, why did nobody have any fucking eyes in this place?) before my gaze fell on Chatot.

Memories of barely three minutes beforehand suddenly found themselves at the forefront of my head, and I tilted my head back down to look at Skitty as I opened my mouth, my pace slowing until we were moving at about a third of our previous speed. Yeah, it was that important.

"Skitty, about yesterday." My mouth _really_ wanted to go dry as she turned back to me, but I didn't give that fucker the opportunity. I'm the one in charge around this body, asshole. "I'm sorry, I really am. I'm sorry if I scared you, and-"

"You didn't scare me." Skitty's tone was so matter-the-fact that I almost tripped over my own feet. Seriously, at that point, Skitty's life flashed before my eyes as I almost fucking dropped her, and believe me when I say I saw way too much pink.

She wasn't allowed to die there, not when there was so much pink up in there, so I forced myself back up into perfect posture, even if I had stopped walking. No dropping partners on their heads or falling over on top of them today, nuh uh.

"You're my best friend." And let me tell you, it was a damn good thing I had stopped, because if I had any momentum at that point it would have sent me directly into the ground. "You'd never hurt me, don't be ridiculous."

Those four words echoed through my head as I stared down at her, my feet rooted to the ground. Seriously, I barely even heard the second half of her sentence. It wasn't just the words either, it was the tone, the quiet reassurance in herself that she was speaking the gospel truth and nothing else, that lit up the klaxons in my head. I'd known her… what, less than half a week at this point? And yet, she could lie there, lounging in my arms, and tell me something like that to my face, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

" _You're my best friend."_

You know that feeling you get, deep down in your bones and slash or your gut, when you out of the blue just have an epiphany? You could be doing whatever, and from nowhere comes one of life's ultimate truths to impart itself upon you via a punch to the fucking spleen? I think that's what happened to me, at the end of that corridor, at that particular second.

I heard those words, and I knew, in that moment, that I was well and truly, universally, irrevocably fucked.

There was no other way to describe it. Sure, it had taken maybe two seconds for Skitty and I to click, but after two tiny adventures together and one night spent apart (and a few Pokémon that had the shit beat out of them, but I was pointedly ignoring them for now), I was completely prepared to donate one of my kidneys, if she would ever need it. It wouldn't have mattered to me if Riolus turned out to only have one kidney, she could fucking have it, I wasn't using it anyway. Hell, maybe I didn't even have one, but I would try my fucking damnedest to grow one if that situation ever came up.

Even then, something was telling me that this really wasn't supposed to happen. That something was wrong, or out of place or maybe just unexplained, but that really didn't help me much, because I was screwed. She had me hooked with a smile and a few words, and I couldn't find it anywhere within myself to give half a shit.

There was a very good chance this level of imprinting was illegal.

Let me tell you, figuring something like that out was scary. Hell, I'd go so far as to call it terrifying.

And I didn't care in the least. Well, maybe I was hoping a little that guns didn't exist here, because I really didn't want to _have_ to take a bullet, but I would sure as shit do so if need be.

I don't really know why it was then that I remembered Skitty was still in my arms, and I don't think I've ever been so careful about putting something or someone down in my life. Completely ignorant of my inner turmoil, Skitty hopped out into the large room, only faltering slightly as Chatot came into view.

She glanced back at me uncertainly, only turning back after I gave her a nod that I had tried to make reassuring in some way. I don't know how it happened, but I think that I managed to succeed, seeing as Skitty decided to turn back around a second later and belt out the morning cheer with gusto to match everyone else, except maybe me.

I drawled the words tonelessly, a fraction of a second behind everyone else with an enormous yawn interrupting me halfway through. Yeah, maybe forgoing sleep last night had been a bad idea.

 **XxX**

Two- no, wait, _three_ words.

Fucking. Called. It.

"The Pokémon on this board…" I tried my hardest to morph my snort into a coughing fit as Chatot whipped around, sending Skitty about a foot into the air with surprise. Honestly, I think that was the reaction that he'd been going for, seeing as his eyes lit up upon seeing Skitty trying to calm herself down. "Are OUTLAWS!"

His delivery was somewhat ruined as I threw my hands into the air with a whoop of triumph. It was too bad that there wasn't the flash of a camera during those next two seconds; Skitty's tail was up in the air, her mouth wide open and her entire coat of fur sticking out on end. My arms had been thrown skywards, my head tilted so far back that I was having trouble keeping my balance. Chatot's body was still facing the board, in complete contrast to his head, which was facing us with a wide open beak and eyes that would probably glow red once the camera's flash went off.

I have no idea how long we stayed like that. Probably no more than a few seconds, but it really did feel like the entire Guild sans me had suddenly been hit by one of those time discrepancies. Nobody was moving a muscle. Hell, except for me, I'm not sure anyone was breathing.

Alas, all good things must come to an end.

"C…Criminals!?" I couldn't help it this time; I burst out into laughter as Skitty started shaking her head back and forth frantically. A bit rude of me, sure, but it was still pretty damn funny. "No way! We've only just started training! How are we supposed to take down-"

"Oh, relax." It was times like this that I wondered how old Skitty actually was. I couldn't help but grin as Skitty sent me a look that somehow managed to mix betrayal and panic, crossing my shaking arms over my chest. "It's not like Wigglytuff is about to send us off to our graves. If he is, though, make sure 'I did not see that coming' is written on my tombstone, would ya Chatot?"

Skitty made a noise I'm pretty sure is generally reserved for fish that have been out of water for too long, and my grin only got wider. Skitty was good in a fight, pretty much up there with me. And that's not something to say lightly, because even though fighting had eventually just become another regular aspect of my life, it was one of the things I enjoyed the most.

There was nothing that could compare to that sort of thrill, and now that I was here, there was nothing to hold me back like there was before. I could see perfectly well where I'd once needed glasses that I never received, there was actual muscle on my bones, and no longer were my ribs visible through the torn shirts that had definitely seen better days.

And fuck yeah, I'd managed to survive and kick ass through all that. This world wasn't all that different when it came to the violence; every time we ventured off any sort of beaten path, there was just another aggressive Pokémon there to attack us for entering their territory.

But this? These Pokémon? Where Skitty was looking and seeing what I presume to be a vicious beating, I was seeing a challenge. I was seeing one of those aggressive whatever Types that fought to get stronger, to build themselves up higher and to elevate their position within the world, whichever they would choose to or just ended up existing in. Hordes of the same thing throwing themselves at us again and again? We could get through them easy. An actual skilled challenge was something I'd yet to come across.

Hell, the closest thing I'd seen probably had to be Koffing and Zubat, and _that_ had been pathetic.

And the best part? Anyone on this board who became a target had already given me a _reason_.

Was Skitty wrong to be scared? 'Course not, there would be more cause for concern if she wasn't. But could she take some of these guys down? I was willing to bet yes, especially if I was there to watch her back. Besides, I didn't exactly have any predisposition to fighting entirely clean.

"…Quite." I wasn't really sure, but I think I was salivating as I looked at the board, and Chatot could definitely see it. "You've no need to worry, there are different levels of outlaws with different tiers of strength. There are those who are truly heinous, and those who are just a little bit naughty. It's merely a matter of picking a foe that is within your limits. Now, let me call someone to help with such a task…"

"Yes!" I hissed under my breath, as Chatot called for Bidoof. I couldn't see him anywhere on our current floor, and even if there were enough places for him to hide in, I decided to settle down next to Skitty to wait. "Let's go beat the shit out of some… who would be our level? What _is_ our level? Murderers, probably not... let's go with arsonists."

"I do not agree with this!" Skitty's voice, despite being barely audible, had never held more force behind it, but I was distracted by both Bidoof emerging from the top of the ladder to our left and my mental images of me fighting some of the Pokémon we'd come across on our journeys with moves that had been taken directly from the Matrix.

Good movie. Maybe. I wouldn't know, I've never watched it.

"I agree with this enough for both of us." My voice was maybe a bit too glib, especially so soon after my epiphany, but I was too excited to care. I mean, come on. Bidoof had probably been here a while, so he must have been a pro at this, he'd know exactly who we could take down, while still having a decent challenge.

I was practically vibrating as Chatot whispered something in Bidoof's ear, my grin bordering on psychotic as he glanced over towards us. With Skitty's palpable dread, we were like the perfect yin and yang, and Bidoof swallowed very loudly in the face of such beautiful disharmony as he turned back to Chatot.

"B-by golly, are you sure?" Chatot nodded, somewhat impatiently, and Bidoof sent us (or me, probably me) another uncertain look before turning to the board. "Well, uh… eenie, meenie, minie…"

I think I managed to hold my deranged grin for a second before the noise of Skitty's chattering teeth registered in my head. And yeah, maybe I was excited, and maybe I knew damn well that she would be fine, but apparently she did not.

Damn it.

"Uh." At the sound of my voice, Bidoof stopped dead, and if I had more experience with sentient quadruped creatures, maybe I would have been able to tell if he straightened up instinctively. "Seeing as this is our first…outlaw, shouldn't we take the time to… prepare?"

The words felt strange in my mouth, especially with my questionable reactions earlier, but in that moment I knew that I was both a horrible best friend and an amazing best friend, and I still have no idea how I managed that. Even now, I keep telling myself that I'll start thinking about it after I deduce how in the Hell I even managed to become someone's best friend.

 **XxX**

"You trust that guy with your money?"

I jerked whatever constituted as my thumb behind me as Skitty and I trotted through town, Bidoof having begged off joining us for the simple fact that I still terrified him. Not that he'd used so many words, but you could see it in his eyes. Besides, Skitty seemed to know the lay of the land well enough, even if she could have been spouting complete lies ever since we'd gotten here and I would never have been able to tell the difference.

Ugh, I trusted her so much.

How appalling.

"Yes, _we_ do." It was definitely nice, seeing some sort of fire behind Skitty's eyes, and I pointedly ignored the fact that it had been lit by fear. She was so much more fun to be around, so much more fun to talk to, which was part of the reason why I decided right in that moment of time that I would do everything in my power to see it become a permanent fixture in her life and mine. And I wasn't one to ever give up on a goal.

Alright, that's a complete lie. I'm a total quitter. I probably come from a long line of quitters. It's amazing I'm here at all.

But, to quote my most favourite movie that I've forgotten the name of, blah something girl worth fighting for.

"Uh, no, _we_ don't, sweetie darling. _We_ are perfectly happy with keeping all of our money on us at all times of the day and night, never letting it fall behind the counter with the creepy eyes that stare into your soul and never look impressed with what they're seeing."

Judging from the way her face twitched about, Skitty just rolled her eyes at the sarcastic tone that would most likely get me killed one day, continuing her tour by pointing out the next building we passed. It was empty, which was probably a good thing, because I probably would have been punched in the teeth if the owner overheard my comment about every single resident having a head so large they'd felt the need to string it up over their workplaces.

Seriously, compensating for something much?

The link shop (whatever the Hell that was supposed to be) failed to hold my attention for very long after it had left my vision, the nursery lasting even shorter. We did end up receiving a couple of odd looks from a nearby bird and ghost when Skitty pointed out what was apparently a dojo, and I used the crayon that was always the first thing I grabbed mentally to pen in a time to visit it. I was actually quite partial to gyms, having slept in a few of the cheaper twenty-four hour ones whenever I could scrounge up enough to pay the membership.

I was also interested in finding out where the limits of this body I had now lay, as well as everything I could possibly do with the energy I could literally feel running through my entire being. Besides, depending on what went on in there, it would probably end up being just as good for Skitty as it would be for me.

Soon enough, Skitty and I had found ourselves in front of a large shop, this one with two Pokémon behind the counter. I think their names were Kecleon and Kecleon, so their parents obviously never loved them, and Skitty had decided to chat with the purple one as the green one gave a rundown of their 'wares'.

To his credit, he never got annoyed when I stopped him after every item to ask just what it did. Guy must have been working retail for ages to build up that sort of tolerance, though it probably helped that everything here was so unnatural with their manners.

(Cough except when it came to eating cough)

"Ah!" Green exclaimed after I pointed at what looked like a seed near the back of the store, almost unsettling in how much power I could feel beneath its surface. "A very fine choice, my friend! That is a Reviver Seed, and should you eat it after you are knocked out, you'll get up straight away, good as new! Only 800 PokéDollars, are you interested?"

His enthusiasm (or desperation, seeing as that was the sixth time he'd asked me that question in as many minutes) was pretty impressive, and for the millionth time in recent memory I paused to seriously consider it. Skitty and I hadn't really run into anything yet that we couldn't handle, but there was always the chance we could. Money wasn't exactly an issue, even with everything we'd gathered together from dungeons and Spoink's reward being split down the middle between us, I still had enough for the seed with my half.

(Skitty had deposited hers in the bank. I had been apologising to the money for her when she'd decided on dragging me away.)

"Sure, I'll take it." It just sounded too useful not to take. Hopefully it wouldn't end up tasting like shit, or, you know, not working whatsoever. Green would have to get my fist surgically removed from his throat if his faulty product ended up getting someone hurt, and Purple would end up having to dig a grave if that someone was Skitty, but the prospect of being able to get up from something one of us couldn't otherwise deal with was just too good to pass up.

Green happily took the money after I managed to count it out (which was a lot more difficult than it had any right being), and the second my fist actually closed around the little seed, I knew it would work as advertised. There was just too much power within for it not to. There was just too much power within it period, what had this thing been fertilised with?

I dropped the seed into my bag as I thanked Green, sentiment attached to the words and everything, and was turning back to Skitty when something blue and round bumped into my chest.

And that's when the screaming started.


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: I'm sorry this took so long. I've recently put my hand through a glass window, and I only got the stitches out earlier today. As you can imagine, typing with a stitched up hand would have been both difficult and painful, but at least now I have a cool scar along with my regained typing abilities.

* * *

" _N-no! Stay away from me! GET BACK!"_

In the time it had taken me to blink, the world had fallen from before my eyes, trapping me in an abyss of never ending darkness. My attempts to backpedal away from the suddenly screaming kid were all for naught, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the voice was coming from and as far as I could tell, I no longer had a body to move.

I couldn't feel anything. My limbs, the temperature around me, and even the blood in my veins; nothing had any sort of sensation in that moment. Blinking was worthless, even if I still had eyelids to move anymore, and I couldn't recall any moment in my life where I'd felt nearly as scared as I did right then.

" _Listen kid, I don't wanna hurt you, but I will if you don't start moving."_

The second voice was garbled, filtered through layers of something that the other one hadn't been bothered with. More so than before, I was starting to get confused. We'd been surrounded by all sorts of different people, how did this new voice figure he was going to get away with whatever he had planned? Hell, the Guild was less than a five minute walk away, and that was assuming one guy could get through every resident of this town on his own, with two hostages.

Or maybe I was completely wrong. There was still nothing around me that I could identify as something, so maybe I was in the wrong ballpark. Hmm, is this what being dead was like? That would suck.

" _No! HELP!"_

Of course, I'd been wrong before.

Something that felt like ice shot through my heart as my eyes snapped back open (and how embarrassing would that have all been if I hadn't been hearing those voices, huh?), glancing down at the weight I could feel on my stomach. What I found was a blue ball, attached to a second blue ball with eyes that were disturbingly wide.

"Oh- I'm sorry!" The thing shouted into my face, with the exact same voice that had been begging for assistance not even five seconds earlier. As disturbing as that was, not wanting to lie on the dirty ground with a strange… person? Object? Fucked if I know, I just wanted to be back on my feet.

Pushing the balls off me… alright, bad sentence, but you get the idea. I was just pulling myself back to my feet as a third blue ball rolled up to us (and now wasn't that a party?), and then that one joined in on the shouting as I wandered over to stand beside Skitty.

"Did you hear someone screaming just now?" It probably wasn't the weirdest thing I've ever said in Skitty's presence, but by the way she looked at me, you never would have figured it. Her attention diverted to the storefront beside us as the waterworks started, and I could vaguely make out Green attempting to diffuse a situation that I wasn't sure if I'd had a part in starting or not.

Eh, I would just wait until someone yelled at me.

"…No." She whispered back slowly, glancing between my face and the fiasco that was now happening in front of our very eyes. There was something about a sick mother, and a missing wallet, and a fair few tears. I kind of wish I had some popcorn, this was starting to get interesting. "Did you?"

"Of course not." First rule of life, lie until you get caught, and then lie some more until you've dug yourself a grave deep enough to get comfortable in. But not to worry, I was certain that this would in no way manage to come back and bite me right in the ass at some later point in my life. This was real life, liars always prosper. "Where would you get that idea from?"

Nobody could know that now I was apparently crazy until _after_ I became valuable enough that the Guild couldn't afford to throw me out at the slightest provocation. I mean, they were already suspicious, but now there was _evidence_.

"Their mother is very sick, you know." Whoa fuck!

Honestly, I hadn't been paying the slightest wisp of attention, so Purple's voice coming from right beside where I was standing made me jump. I was slowly backing away a second later, my path leading me to where I could easily shepherd Skitty away should something weird happen. That level of stealth wasn't natural for store clerks, no way. "So every day, they come here, and spend some of their pocket money on Apples so she can start feeling better."

I stopped before I managed to get between Skitty and the counter, my eyes narrowed and my head tilted slightly to the side. Alright, why did he think this was any of our business? Was this supposed to be common knowledge? Did those kids (I dunno, they sounded like they were still kids) know that he was talking about them behind their back?

No, I refuse to gossip about children. Guild members and storeowners, they're fair game, but there has to be a line somewhere, damn it.

"Oh no! That's awful!" _Of course_ Skitty would get sucked into the story. Rolling my eyes, I blinked and turned around- almost falling right over onto my ass as Purple and Green stared back at me.

Quickly, I checked behind me, where I had been looking a second earlier.

Nothing. The fuck…?

Purple nodded solemnly, rearranging a few discs on the wall behind him as Green opened his mouth to continue the tale. "Yes, it is-"

"Time to go!" Was that rude of me? Yes, very, but I think you'll find that I did not care in the slightest. Because see, in between all the disturbing shop owners and the random existential crises within the entropic void of oblivion and hallucination, I'd yet to forget the fact that I was scheduled to beat the shit out of something that had been asking for it. You don't simply forget about something like that. "We best get back to the Guild now, Bidoof is expecting us!"

I could feel my fake smile wobbling. This was a dangerous game I was playing, attempting to not alienate the only fucking store in the little settlement. These gecko weirdos must have had this town's economy by the balls.

"Do we have to-"

"Yes." I hissed from the corner of my mouth, slowly steering Skitty away as both brothers blinked in unison. Maybe they'd never been interrupted before, I don't know, but it looked like they had stopped breathing in a desperately attempt to reboot.

Gossipers were the worst sort of criminal. They always had all the time in the world, and if they weren't airing someone else's dirty laundry, they were going over everything you told them with a fine tooth comb, picking out all the inconsistencies and discovering that I had once spent a night in a holding cell when I was eight because I tried to shove a tennis ball up a police officer's ass and nobody cared enough to come pick me up.

And seeing as I actually had shit to do today, I could _not_ let that happen.

"Thank you for everything! Have a nice life, see you when I get desperate enough to come crawling back!" With great gusto, I whirled around to drag Skitty back to the Guild… and slammed head first into what had to be the hardest fucking skull I've ever felt in my life.

The world around me wavered. Not in a 'going-to-sleep-via-blunt-force-trauma' way, more in a… you know what, I couldn't explain it if you paid me. All I know is that it happened when Blue Balls had sent me to the ground, and the atmosphere sounded like it was about to go ludicrous speed all over my gray matter.

I just blinked, already resigned to whatever fuckery I'd stumbled ass-backwards into this time, and the town had already disappeared.

 **XxX**

I've gotta hand it to my imagination, it really knew how to make things interesting.

He empty blackness from before had been what I was expecting, but I wasn't going to complain as I surveyed the mountaintops surrounding my new position. From what I could tell, I still didn't have anything resembling a body, but at least not I had the means to optically scan what was around me.

The mountain itself was pretty much plain, nothing to differentiate it from any other mountain I'd ever been on in my life. True, that number was lacking, but how interesting could they really be?

No sounds came out when I hummed, an attempt to blink resulting in a failure to generate any darkness. Figures I'd be a camera lens in my own head, I mused as I turned around to see if I could find anything that would work as a landmark. What else had I really been expecti- holy shit what is that!?

Having something pass through your body, when your body wasn't really there, was the weirdest thing I've ever felt, hands down. Whoever it was, it was yellow, and the dent it made in the mountain when it landed actually made me wince. Something behind me was panting, but for whatever reason, my hallucination had chosen now to lock my head in place.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't move. I was about as worried as I was annoyed- where was all that control you were supposed to have over your dreams when you knew they were dreams? I call bullshit.

" _You'll regret that!"_

Wait… I knew that voice.

Out of the dust cloud that had been kicked up when the body had hit the ground stepped a yellow… thing. Dude was yellow and fat, and if his voice was any indication, pissed off.

" _Say hi to your pathetic partner for me when you join her in the afterlife!"_ The dust cloud turned purple before my very apparently absent eyes, and from where I was 'standing' I could see Fatty bounce into the air with surprising grace. I don't think I would have been able to do that sort of thing if my body was that shape.

With his forehead blazing, Fatty kicked off… the air(?) (by the way, holy shit what the fuck?), shooting at an almost perfect dive towards where I was standing. The crash was thunderous in my ears, and before I could tell what had happened, the scene playing out before me had been replaced with nothing but endless shadows.

For fuck sakes, not again.

 **XxX**

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry! You're not hurt, are you?"

Like a bungee cord stretched to its very limits, I snapped violently back to where I had been before. Once again on the ground, once again having someone I didn't know looking down at me, once again after a dream that was way too real to be false.

So I was a prophet now? Ugh.

I took the hand that had been offered to me, being pulled back to and almost off my feet. Opening my mouth to thank or berate whoever I layed eyes on first, I froze, staring at the guy who had just been having the shit beaten out of him before my very eyes like a deer caught in the headlights.

"No, I'm…" I trailed off, doing my best to make sense of everything. But even then, at what point was I supposed to start? Where was I supposed to go with whatever trail I was trying to follow?

Uh, let's see… until now, I'd never seen this guy or heard his voice, but somehow I was able to perfectly mimic both appearance and acoustic frequency within my own head. That was a good start, but who even was this guy? Tentatively, I extended my hand for a shake, doing my best to stall for time as I examined him.

Nose, eyes, jelly rolls, pigmentation, everything was exactly where it should have been on a caricature I had no chance of referencing before now. The tiny sample of voice that I'd managed to get from his apology was perfectly fitting, right down to the way his eyes narrowed a hairsbreadth that perfectly coincided with the jolt of extreme annoyance that passed through my body when it didn't even belong to me.

Sure, it could have just been an extreme coincidence. I got a split second glance of him when I accidentally ploughed into him, and as a result he got to star in my daydream. It would be easy to brush off as nothing, before I found myself magically in the body of a small blue dog that could explode things with a punch and a spark of wizardry. Now weird shit was my day to day life, and whoever this guy was, he had been threatening Blue Balls.

And Blue Balls was undeniably a child. That was not cool.

Sure, prophetic dreams weren't something I had much experience in, but something that felt very important was whispering in my ear, begging me not to ignore this. I would ask Chatot when we got back to the Guild, he was the head of intelligence, but for now I would be going with my gut on this one.

At least at the end of it all, I would be able to plead insanity should I come down to it. Oh yeah, airtight.

"Sorry about that." Plastering on the same smile that I had been using on the gecko brothers, I firmly grasped his hand when he raised it, deliberately adding as much pressure as I felt he could take without having anything break. "I should have been looking where I was going. Name's Luke."

"Drowzee." The guy didn't even flinch. I withdrew my hand, my smile extending to include some teeth as he turned and nodded to Skitty. "The fault is mine, I shouldn't have been moving so quickly. Apologies for rushing, but you wouldn't have happened to have seen where those two brothers from before were going? I believe I might have some information that would be useful to them."

"You mean Marill and Azurill?" I don't know how I managed to not step between Skitty and this Drowzee guy when his full attention turned to her. The more time I spent in his presence, the less comfortable I was feeling. Whatever was happening to me, I don't think it was entirely natural. "Yeah, they were going just up the road a minute ago."

Marill. That name had come from green when the bigger blue ball had started talking, hadn't it? I hadn't heard his voice in the dream (or should I call them visions?), but would that make the owner of the other voice his _brother,_ Azurill?

 _That_ was officially a connection, and a means to eradicate plausible deniability. I was officially confused, and more than a little worried.

What? Blue Balls may not have been my responsibility, but I reiterate: CHILD. As well as DREAM. VISION. WHAT THE FUCK EVER. WHAT HAS MY LIFE BECOME.

"Ah, I must have missed them somehow! How silly of me!" Drowzee's words were covered in so much saccharine that I could almost feel myself beginning to choke on all the synthetic crap, his eyes lingering on me a little longer than the others before he turned around and hurried off down the road.

"Thank you very much!" He called over his shoulder hastily, disappearing around a corner a second later.

I didn't even notice that my hands were shaking until Skitty's tail came up to tap one of my knuckles. Jolting out of whatever trance I had gotten into now, I tore my eyes away from where Drowzee had fucked off to, blinking down at the concerned gaze being directed my way.

"Luke?" Skitty tilted her head to the side, and I immediately promised myself that I would explain everything that had just happened on our way back to the Guild. "Are you alright?"

I could have sworn that the wind had just carried Drowzee's voice back to me as I clenched my teeth, the click loud enough to draw the attention of the owner that neighboured Green and Purple's shop.

"Not even close." I muttered, spinning on my heel and nodding towards the lizard bros. I really needed to get the names of their species before I came back. Midway through my head coming back up, a thought popped into my head, forcing my mouth open so it could escape from between my teeth. "Thanks for everything. Has the mother of those brothers tried one of those... Health Seeds yet? You explained them as being able to cure anything."

Yeah, that's right. I'd been listening. This shit was important, after all.

"Almost anything." Green corrected in a manner that made it seem automatic, before swivelling around to address his brother. "We've some spare Heal Seeds in storage, do we not?"

"I believe we do sell a surprisingly small amount per annum." Purple mused, as I tapped Skitty on the shoulder and started walking away. "Certainly enough to spare one should the need arise."

"A fine idea, brother." I didn't need to look over my shoulder to know that there were two stares being directed at my back. My brain was on autopilot as it was, still working to process everything it had come across in the last few minutes, and it wasn't having much luck at all. "A fine idea indeed."

 **XxX**

I've got work in the morning, so I'll end it here. I hope I'm remaining faithful to or exceeding any expectations that have been placed upon this story.

In regards to Luke's reaction to the Dimensional Scream (which will be explained later on, don't worry): In the game, the player character is supposed to be a blank state. I get that, but there is surprisingly little speculation on their part over what it could be. I see the reason for keeping it under wraps, you don't want everyone thinking you're crazy, but there's one crucial difference here. Well, two really.

Luke isn't the caricature for the adventures of the player. He's actively trying to not remain in the dark about what is going on around him, with varying levels of effort, admittedly.

And whether he realises it or not, he trusts Chatot enough to go to him with this. In the game, you don't think all too highly of him until maybe Brine Cave. Here, Luke has had more exposure, and he's already screwed up in a way that doesn't invoke a response a la Apple Woods (hating Chatot because he's kind of an idiotic asshat, which let's be honest, he doesn't do much to refute). It's pretty much that simple, a little case of Alternate Character Interpretation in-universe.


	7. Chapter 7

"You had a vision."

Wigglytuff's creepy-ass statue eyes stared at me from above the Guild entrance as I nodded, stepping onto the grate that was crucial to our completely flawed entry system and crossing my arms. Skitty's voice sounded tired, maybe even bored, which surely had to be a sign that my extremely bipolar attitude that day had not gone unnoticed.

Not for the first time, I pondered briefly whether I had truly lost my mind. Then the grate beneath my feet started talking to me, and I ignored that train of thought in favour of stepping through the opening gates and throwing myself down the ladder inside.

"Yep." My tone was light; some may have even called it peppy by my standards, as though I wasn't facing a possibly life altering change within my common sensibilities. I wasn't looking forward to telling the story all over again, seeing as it had taken up basically the whole trip back to the Guild the first time, but right now I needed more information. "And now I'm going to go talk to Chatot. Coming?"

Skitty nodded immediately, giving the outlaw board a wide berth as we walked past it. Personally, I was still very much looking forward to heading out there, but there was absolutely no way I was going to leave myself in the dark about this. For all I knew, this was something that had happened here before, and Skitty just didn't know about it.

Besides, what was the worst that could happen? Chatot capturing me and holding me against my will, forcing visions of the future out of me until he managed to climb all the way to the top of the corporate ladder and no longer had any use for me?

No, that was something _I_ would do. I'd treat my captive fairly, of course; maybe grant them half of all my earnings. I was hardly going to alienate someone who could see the fucking future, that would just be silly, and there really was no need for that much money anyway. Seriously, what could all the money in the world get me that half the money in the world couldn't?

Well, one third of the money. Skitty would get a cut too, of course, even if she was a weirdo who would probably give it to a charity, of something just as likely to be corrupted and pointless.

"Should you really tell Chatot?" The question was quiet enough to not travel down the rest of the ladder we were currently descending. Skitty's tail sprang out, wrapping around my wrist and forcing me to stop moving. Her bottom lip was moving worriedly between her sharp teeth when I turned around, already turning red from the friction. "He might end up thinking you're crazy!"

I couldn't help but laugh, carefully tugging Skitty's tail until she lost her balance and came toppling down on top of me. My grip turned out to be lacklustre in regards to the situation I had brought upon myself, and somehow Skitty ended up standing perfectly straight on top of my head, while I landed on one hand, the other jammed between the last two rungs of the ladder and both my legs stretched into a pose I had seen more than once on the teenagers back home who didn't have a reason for not being able to dress themselves properly.

Seamlessly, I twisted myself back to my feet, mentally patting myself on the back when Skitty didn't as much as budge. Oh yeah, I was good.

"Sanity is as illogical as believing logic is logical." Out the corner of my eye, I watched as Loudred mouthed 'what the fuck' towards the hole he was always standing in front of, shaking my head at his ignorance as I approached Chatot's turned back. "I'm not having my perceptions be carved for me by society. Maybe you just don't listen hard enough when your surroundings try to talk to you."

My vision was very quickly replaced with Skitty's head, and I didn't even need the twitching of her facial muscles to know that I was being stared at blandly.

"Hey, Chatot!"

Naturally, I completely ignored her. If anyone asked, I was still going to blame the dreams. Visions. Drisions. Veams!

Yeah, that works.

"A guy hit me in the head and I had a veam that he kidnapped children."

Chatot had already twisted around at his name, his expression a second later suggesting that he regretted that decision immensely.

"…And?"

 **XxX**

"…So let me get this straight."

"So straight's the correct term for you? Now I owe Croagunk ten bucks."

"What was that?"

"Nothing! Please, continue."

Chatot's withering glare clashed against my stare of pure angelic innocence, throwing so many sparks that I was honestly surprised when nobody dove for cover. Recounting my story had taken more time than I had cared to waste, and by the time I was done, most of the Guild had fallen against their curiosity and gathered around to listen.

Too bad we didn't have a campfire, especially seeing as Chimecho had emerged from what I presumed to be the kitchen about ten minutes into the story, a bag of marsh-mellows floating merrily along behind her.

"So while you were busy shopping, you were run over by a small child, whom then began panicking due to the fact that he had left his money at home." Skitty had taken over for that part of the tale, by that point resigned to my decision. Wow, I really was a bad friend. "It was at that point you began hearing unfamiliar voices, with one threatening the other for cooperation. After the child had been joined by his brother and they had left, you collided with yet another person, this 'Drowzee' character, and began hallucinating once more, this time with ocular simulation along with auditory?"

"And now here I am, telling you about all of this." I crossed my arms, nodding along with the words escaping Chatot's mouth conclusively. "So am I finally going insane, or is this something that tends to happen around here?"

Chatot's beak clicked shut, his eyes narrowing even further as he stared at me. I wasn't exactly sure what he was looking for, but he must have found it eventually, because once it became apparent I wasn't going to give any ground all he did was sigh.

"Everyone." His voice rang out sharply, making whoever was sanding at either side of me jump. I know one of them was Skitty, but I hadn't paid attention to the other one since they rocked up. It could have been Wigglytuff himself and I… actually, there was no way in Hell that I wouldn't have noticed Wigglytuff. "Back to work."

A groan swept across the entire room, as if they were all actually looking forward to whatever this little talk would be concluded with. With no small amount of dawdling and dragging of feet, everyone slowly made their way back to their posts, and Chatot waited until all attention was off himself before letting his head fall into his wings.

I'm pretty sure I heard him mutter something about a 'bad tempered Wigglytuff' before he looked up at me again.

"Prophetic dreams-"

"Veams." I interrupted out of sheer necessity, raising an eyebrow at the flat look I received. "Dream visions, look it up."

"… _Veams_ ," Chatot rolled his eyes, shooting a disgruntled look at the massive doors we were standing in front of before diverting his attention back to me, "are not entirely uncommon. There are entire species of Pokémon who share in that ability, but Riolu and, by extension, Lucario typically do not fall into that category."

"Lucario?" Riolu was a familiar term, but it was the first time I was hearing anything about a Lucario. Cool name, though, I could definitely get used to sharing an ancestor, or whatever its significance, with one.

All pretence of annoyance left Chatot's face, his eyes scrunching up in confusion as he stared at me. "Lucario, your evolution." Chatot hedged a glance in Skitty's direction as I tilted my head to the side, not entirely sure where this conversation was going. At least when we were talking about veams, I was able to keep up. "Luke, may I hazard an inquiry that may be personal?"

My eyes drifted down from where they had been admiring the ceiling. We had a very pretty ceiling in this place. "Shoot."

"Where did you live before arriving in Treasure Town?"

All the fuzzy thoughts drifting through my head like a fog cleared away, and Chatot's eyes went back to being narrowed as I straightened up a little. Almost against my will, my body prepared itself to launch into a Quick Attack, intent on escape should the need arise.

It wasn't like I was ashamed of (most of my) heritage, but the subject in and of itself was… difficult to broach. I may have told Skitty that I hadn't always been a Pokémon, I honestly couldn't remember if I had or not and she was the only one I would trust with that knowledge, but what was I supposed to say to a guy with whom I was already discussing my brief glimpses into the future? That I'd recently changed specie after falling into what I could have only assumed to be a portal to another dimension?

Hmm, that really got me thinking, how much more absurd could my situation get? You know, if it really, _really_ tried.

"How do you know I didn't just keep my head down in Treasure Town for a while?" As soon as the words left my lips, I could have smacked myself. Yeah, good job not making anyone suspicious, dickweed.

"Your accent, the way you hold your satchel, your gait," So… I spoke funny, I looked funny, and I walked funny? Alright, first off, damn. Second off, Chatot, you prick. "Your seeming lack of knowledge about anything to do with Aura, your foreign style of fighting, and _especially_ your vocabulary."

All of a sudden, I'd found my goal in life. Skitty wanted to be a famous explorer, and I would still help her to the best of my ability, but now I was going to get Chatot to say the word 'fuck' if it killed me. But first…

"Aura?"

An odd noise arose from where Chatot was standing, and it took me a moment to realise he was grinding his beak. His stare was beginning to feel a little unnerving, and by the time he had twisted his head towards Skitty, I was getting the distinct impression that I'd just been classified as an unsolved, and perhaps even interesting puzzle.

I still don't know how I felt about that.

"Tell me," Chatot began, making me turn to face Skitty for the first time in a while when I realised he was no longer speaking to me, "did he begin to act oddly before or after the first pro… _veam_?"

"A little bit before." Came the immediate reply. I would have huffed petulantly if I wasn't so blindsided; I wasn't acting strangely… was I? I opened my mouth to protest that it had merely been the result of an epiphany and making a new, albeit slightly weird friend (and wouldn't have that gone down well?), but I was forced to swallow the words as the Guild's chief of intelligence or whatever his title was snapped back around towards me, so quickly that I was honestly concerned for a moment that he'd hurt himself.

"I am going to send a message out to an old friend. If your natural ability with Aura is manifesting itself in such a way, then I am ill equipped to provide any form of assistance. The mental arts are some of the most strenuous that can be cultivated, adding to those enough power to transcend time and space can be… dangerously fatiguing." Chatot shook his head, pointedly looking through the window in any location that my reflection was not present. "In all honestly, the simple fact that a slight mercurial unbalancing is the entire backlash you have received is astounding. If it were only unskilled resistance I would be merely impressed with your fortitude, but when multiplied with the volatile nature of unrestrained Aura…"

Chatot shook his head slowly, and I felt, rather than saw Skitty huddle against me. It wasn't like I didn't understand why, but in all honesty I felt fine. Maybe a bit fuzzy in the cortex that took care of that kind of thing, but concern wasn't entirely necessary right now.

"I will, of course, be informing the Guild Master about this." Chatot glanced over his shoulder, and I couldn't quite keep the snort under wraps. What, did he think I was expecting him to keep this a secret for me? Compared to Wigglytuff, in Chatot's eyes I was nothing but a responsibility. "I also expect you to pay a visit to the dojo located near the bank. The owner has mastered Aura to a fuller extent than anyone in recent memory, and it is simply too dangerous for you to remain untrained any longer. Consider this an order."

Skitty's tail had wrapped around my waist protectively by that point, and with a small huff, I ran a nail over the centre of it. Originally, it had been an attempt to make her loosen it a little and let me breathe a little easier, but when she shuddered and started purring so loudly that the reflection of Loudred turned to regard us with an incredulous stare, I had to swallow down an evil cackle.

It escaped somewhat through my nostrils as an odd honk, which went completely ignored by her. Oh, I was so going to use this in the future.

"For now," Chatot's dry tone made Skitty jump, and I certainly did not yelp when her tail slipped down and then tightened like a vice around my hips. I _squeaked_ , fighting in vain to save as many future children as I could before she finally got the message and released me. Sucks to be her, now she was never going to be an aunt. "Now that we have dealt with that, I expect the two of you to get back to work. Bidoof is still waiting for you, and the boards were updated not very long ago."

Ah yes, the distant rumbling that had so very rudely interrupted my story halfway through. I nodded, not trusting my voice to have remained at an even pitch as I trudged back towards the ladder. Every step made the pain ebb slightly away, and it was only my hobbled steps that stopped me from going over to Loudred and kicking his ass after he turned to Corphish, brought a hand to the side of his enormous head, and twirled it around a little.

Instead, I snapped off a tiny piece of the third ladder rung from the bottom, hurling it with deadly accuracy as soon as he had turned back to his hole. It struck true, treating me to the most beautiful sight in the world; Loudred pitching forward, alternating between swearing and screaming as his arms pin-wheeled in a helpless attempt to remain balanced.

I was basically numb with glee as I watched him disappear over the edge, his ridiculous voice growing quieter and quieter. Which wasn't saying much; I could still understand him perfectly after five solid seconds of falling, but that didn't change the fact that it was still up there with the most perfect moment of my life.

In the end, it was Croagunk's quiet gasps of laughter from where he was standing in front of his cauldron that did me in. The laugh bubbled from between my lips, alternating between a howl and outright cackle as I began to ascend the ladder. Tears began to dampen my fur when the unmistakable thump of Loudred landing and the consequent cursing reached my ears. Dude must have managed to get through about nine previous generations of my family tree by the time I was halfway to the next floor, and every sentence was just sending me that much closer to delirium.

My amazingly good mood (which could probably count as a mood swing, now that I thought about it) lasted me up until I was standing in front of the outlaw board, my laughter closing off with a strangled choke as my eyes landed on the top corner of the innocent plank of wood and cork. Beside me, Skitty tensed up, a sound so wondrous that I could only hope it would have sent me into cardiac arrest (for then and only then would I be able to die happy) in literally any other situation tumbling from her lips.

" _Fuck!_ "

As it stood, however, palpitations would have to wait.

The paper was innocuous enough. A request from one Officer Magnemite, to apprehend a criminal that was giving law enforcement trouble. Two large, golden stars stood out near the bottom of the page, and a large picture took up a good portion near the top; that big, fuck ugly nose was unmistakable.

I felt the pit of my stomach drop. The voice in my first vision had definitely been Azurill's; which would mean that Blue Balls and his brother could be in some deep shit.

The poster disappeared from the wall like magic, and we were both up the ladder and sprinting through the Guild's front gates before Bidoof had even gotten the chance to say hello.

 **XxX**

"The second veam, where was it!?"

"The mountains!" I kicked off the ground before reaching the grate, sailing over the hole and pulling a map from my satchel before I hit the ground again. "I don't know about the first one, but the second one was in the mountains!"

Skitty came up beside me, showing off some impressive acceleration as we charged down the hill. I hadn't yet launched into a Quick Attack, not wanting to leave Skitty behind, instead focusing on the map and trusting my partner to let me know if I was heading towards a tree or something similar. My brain was going a mile a minute, my neck twitching as I took in the entire cartoony terrain and silently hoped that it was all accurate.

"We start with this one, Mt… Bristle!" I decreed, glancing up just long enough to see Skitty nod her consent before shoving the map back into my bag. Mt Bristle was the closest thing that looked like a mountain on the map, which would have to do for now. Drowzee had gotten maybe a twenty minute head start on us, but if I was correct, then he would either be tailing or have Blue Balls with him.

If I were going to go with the evidence that had been presented to me, I would hazard a guess that Azurill wasn't all that quick. So Mt Bristle it would have to be.

A flash of gold caught the edge of my vision, and I ground my heels into the dirt beneath my feet, catching Skitty begin to slow down as I screeched to a halt and stared at who I had almost run into. Krabby blinked back at me, as unruffled as ever, a small bubble clinging to the corner of his mouth.

"…Hello." He said simply.

My mouth flapped uselessly for a moment, before I caught sight of Skitty over Krabby's head. She was hopping on the spot, her face getting more and more panicked with each passing moment. Without a second thought, I planted a hand firmly between Krabby's eyes, vaulting over his head and hitting the ground sprinting.

"Sorry, Krabby!" I called over my shoulder, to the…empty…path… "I'm busy r-"

"Krabby can keep up."

I almost tripped over my own feet as I caught up with Skitty, looking to my other side to see Krabby staring directly into my eyes. Risking a quick glance over my shoulder, I marvelled at the dust cloud following the three of us, almost laughing at the comical sight of Krabby's bent legs pumping so quickly that I couldn't even see them as more than a blur.

You know what? Whatever.

"Skitty, Krabby. Krabby, Skitty. I'll meet the two of you there." My body exploded with an outline of pure white, the pulse of the energy ruffling the leaves around us and digging two foot sized craters into the dirt beneath me. Swerving onto the path that would lead to the mountains, I blinked as a pink blur shot past me, so utterly dumbfounded that I didn't notice the streak of gold that followed after it.

I did, however, note the blue glow that was now accompanying the white around my body. And let me tell you, what followed was equal parts the scariest and most _thrilling_ moment of my life.

I took off once more- moving so quickly that the consequential shockwave sent a tsunami of water from the filled well I had been stopped in front of. I didn't even find that out until later; between heartbeats I had already zoomed past both Krabby and Skitty, traveling so mind numbingly quickly that nothing around me could have been classified as more than a vague shade of a colour.

The path leading to the Drenched Bluff, which had taken Skitty and I about ten minutes to reach the first time, had come and gone before my brain had caught up to my body. My feet were barely touching the ground before sending me forth, at a higher speed than I had been going before. By the time I had reached a path that looked like it could lead me up the only landmark I could have possibly used, Mt Bristle itself, I felt a little out of breath.

Not from the running, but from the fact that I had been moving so quickly that I think the oxygen was having a hard time getting down to my lungs before what I assume was the pressure tore it away from me.

Despite it all, I kept running.

My first step on the mountain carried me over what must have been fifty meters. The second was a leap that shed no momentum, propelling me from the ledge I had been standing on to another that would have been impossible to reach by conventional means. The third got me past an attack that had been launched from a Pokémon that I hadn't even had time to look at, and on the fourth I was joined by something that looked sort of like a bird, small and mainly black and white. The thing managed to keep pace with me for three whole heartbeats, before my feet hit the ground once more and it was left in a cloud of dust.

There was nothing but atmosphere surrounding me. Nothing was touching me; nothing could get close enough to hope to accomplish that. The energy surrounding my body, one belonging to me and the other gifted, carried me up towards the summit and around boulders, stealing the air from my lungs to grant me a platform on which to fly.

This may as well have been what I had been living for, this ridiculous speed. I felt invincible, like I could hit the tip of the mountain and still keep going up. It was exhilarating, gripping my body with the biting fingers of the universe and attempting to wrench a cheer of sheer euphoria.

Except I didn't let it.

No matter how fast I was, I wasn't likely to ever be invincible, which was something that I couldn't afford to let slip my mind.

Because I was getting close to the summit, and I had just heard Azurill scream.

 **XxX**

It had been little more than a whisper on the wind, tugging at my ear drum with a vibration so gentle I'd almost not noticed it. Had I been a step to the right, or perhaps a meter in front of where I'd ended up, I doubt I would have been able to hear it. The voice made me snap my head around without thinking, a grunt escaping my as my foot caught a rock and sent me flying over a ledge I would have otherwise been able to navigate fine.

Tucking my legs closer to my chest, I rolled through the air, barely skimming over a particularly pointed boulder. I hit the ground feet first about ten meters down, the impact making my head spin and the bones in my ankles groan in complaint.

Before the pain had been given the chance to register, I was off once more, kicking up a pretty impressive cloud of dust if I do say so myself. Azurill's voice drifted down the path I had found myself on once more, sounding far closer than it had not five seconds before.

I shook my head, pushing my Quick Attack a little further as the blue glow around my body dimmed slightly. Figures I would find the perfect method of getting from point A to B after falling off part of the damn mountain. Now I just had to make sure to make it there before anything heinous happened.

The world _lurched_ around me as the blue glow receded completely, almost throwing me off balance entirely as my foot hit the ground. Before I got the chance to grumble in annoyance over it's absolutely fucking spectacular timing, the narrow walls of cliff on either side of me had suddenly fallen away, leaving me on a flat plateau of stone and a few randomly strewn out plants.

And standing right on the other end was Drowzee, his back facing me. Hmm, at full speed, I had maybe three seconds before I would crash into him. Three seconds with which to slow down and carefully think through what exactly I was going to do in this ensuing battle fo-ah hahahahahahaha, this bitch was going to get my foot up his ass.

Hey, don't look at me like that. I learned to fight on the streets. What was I supposed to do, yell at him to stop what he was doing if he may please and also you are under arrest for disturbing the peace? No, yeah, that would work perfectly.

Democracy completely ignored, I kicked myself into the highest gear I could manage, hurtling across the flat ground at speeds that I know _I_ wouldn't want to be hit at. My knee connected with the back of Drowzee's (hard as fucking diamond) head with enough force to make my toes twitch in pain, sending him sprawling onto the ground towards Azurill.

I have to hand it to Blue Balls, the kid's brain had been working in that moment. The second Drowzee hit the ground, he'd started bouncing away at what I hoped was his top speed, tearing ass towards the path I'd just taken. Good thing he did, too, because if he hadn't I probably wouldn't have been able to do what I did next.

See, right at that moment, I was telling myself that I needed to buy some time. Time for Skitty and Krabby to get here, and time for Azurill to get the Hell out of here. Drowzee was on the ground in front of me, my body was pretty much flooded with adrenaline, and there was now a perfectly inviting hole in the wall that was about half the circumference of Drowzee's gut. So if I told you that my next immediate action was to heft his body up, take a running leap, and jam him snout-first into the little hole in the wall a la Looney Tunes, you would have to agree with me that it was up there with the best ways to proceed with this situation.

I'll admit, I may have panicked when Drowzee immediately started screaming bloody murder, planting his hands on either side of the hole to heave his head out. Kicking him in the ass hadn't actually been on the to-do list, regardless of the foot up the ass comment earlier, but it served its purpose. Drowzee squeaked as the entire top half of his body was shoved into the tiny cavern, my next two kicks doing little more than pissing him off. He was pretty thoroughly wedged, up to around the middle of his stomach with only two thrusts, and damn it, I was a little proud of myself for my quick thinking.

Up until Drowzee's hands started glowing, and the fucking cliff wall exploded.

I'm pretty sure the noise that came out of my mouth was a shriek. It was high, it was sharp, and it certainly wasn't going to be repeated ever again. Rocks filled my vision as I backed away, at least three zooming right past my head before I could ever think about dodging. I was on the ground and rolling away by the time the fourth, pretty much a boulder in its own right, created a crater where I had been standing, on my arms and spinning away from the fifth and sixth in precisely the same moment my ability to consciously think through my left me completely.

I didn't need it right now, and it had realised it before I had. The next ten seconds were a blur of stone, Quick Attack, and the occasional flash of blue as my own limbs flew past my eyes. I kind of wish I had been able to view myself do that in one of my veams, it must have been pretty damn impressive to watch.

"You!" As suddenly as they had been arriving, the rocks all stopped in mid-air, dropping with a collective thump and granting me an uninhabited look at Drowzee. He looked pretty pissed off, as well as suspiciously cylindrical. "You're from before, at the market!"

I raised a hand to wave at him, doing my best to make my grin seem mocking. If the distance between us wasn't sufficient to hide how it shook from slight exertion, nobody mentioned anything. "Yep. Name's Luke, proud co-founder of Team Poképals, name pending." I tapped my chin faux-contemplatively, letting my head fall to either side with exaggerated nonchalance. "I was actually thinking of changing it when I manage to get through to Wigglytuff. Pop quiz, which do you prefer being apprehended by, Team Litty or Team Skuke?"

"I've never heard of a Team Poképals." Drowzee was backing up, ignoring my follow-up question like the total prick he was proving himself to be. Dude had thrown nearly an entire hill at my head, sure, but why had I been worried about this guy, again? "Tell me, how long have you been an explorer?"

I waved the hand that was already raised carelessly, sneaking an idle glance over my shoulder. On the good side, Azurill was out of sight. On the bad side, Skitty and Krabby were out of sight. "Eh, you know. Maybe two or three… days."

It was actually a sight to behold, watching the utter reversal of Drowzee's attitude. His hunched back was suddenly straightened out, his hands by his sides instead of in front of him and his panicked grimace replaced with a smile that was all smug confidence. "And you think you're capable of catching me? Pfft, you're about-"

"Lemme guess, a hundred years too early to even think about that?" I let my hands rest on my hips, nodding solemnly to myself. Looking back, it honestly wasn't the best plan I've ever had, letting my guard down entirely while in the presence of an enemy, but could you really blame me? Even I knew how damn clichéd that phrase was. How cringe worthy. "I was correct, wasn't I? You were totally going to say that. You should be ashamed of yourself, you're nowhere near intimidating enough to try pulling that one off- _ohshit_!"

Drowzee's aim must have been off or something, because there was no chance that I'd just moved quick enough to dodge the _motherfuckinglightningholyshit_ that he'd just shot at me. His fist, still stretched out, was covered with crackling electricity, the hand he was resting by his side bursting into flames. With both arms he gestured, and I was already throwing myself into a Quick Attack and setting a perimeter of a healthy few meters. No chance in Hell I was sticking around to see what he was planning on doing.

Hmm, why did my back feel so warm- _oh no_.

I didn't bother turning around to confirm my theory, too worried about the fire that I assume was being shot a few steps behind me. I was very quickly running out of room before the edge of the cliff, which would leave me the option of turning around or following it along.

I couldn't afford trying to circle the lip of the summit, not if there was the chance I would get thrown off. At this height, there was every chance that I wouldn't be able to land in a way that wasn't seriously debilitating, which only left me one choice. With a grunt, I let myself fall to the ground, tumbling in as controlled a manner as I could manage and digging my heels in once I'd gotten back my feet, facing the opposite direction that I had been running.

Immediately, I regretted that action.

Fire, tinted pink at the base, crashed in all around me. The air, now that I had stopped moving too quickly to sample it reeked of smoke and smoulder, not entirely surprising considering the tidal wave of conflagration that was flooding towards me. I was trapped, edged up against a drop of a good few hundred meters and awash within a sea of oddly coloured flames. There were only two options open to me at that moment, death by blunt force trauma courtesy of gravity, or burning to a crisp where I stood.

Naturally, I did something fucking stupid. I swear it sort of seemed smart to me at the time but hey, when you get out of a situation like this, _then_ you can come back and judge me.

My body covered in white energy, I leapt forward, punching through the cover of fire that had been descending on me and bursting out through the other side. It had been hot, it had hurt, and it had worked like a charm. Drowzee recoiled away from where he was standing as I hurdled through the air towards him, and with all the fury of a person who had almost been damn well set on fire I swung my leg around and kicked him right in the stupid snout.

With my foot. Which was _on fire_. My foot was on- you know what, it wasn't hurting me at all, I don't even care right now.

Look, today has been a long day, alright?

Drowzee stumbled back, steam rising from his face as he swung his hand around. I barely managed to drop to the ground before an arc of lightning passed through the air above me, and I was already back on my feet as the sea of fire came crashing back towards me. With practiced grace I leapt away, not bothering to shield my face as another bout of electricity detonated a stone beside me and pelted me with shrapnel. I was already gone before any serious damage could be done.

And so it continued for a few minutes, me doing all I could to close the gap and him doing all her could to blast the ever loving shit out of me. Already, the fire had clipped me twice, and my foot was still tingly from a near miss with his electricity that hadn't been a miss at all.

A rush of displaced air was all the warning I got before I changed directions, wincing as a rock larger than my entire body skimmed across the ground millimetres from my arm. I was beginning to notice a serious problem with this entire fight, and it was stemming from the fact that I had nothing to throw here that weren't rocks.

Oh, I could throw punches. My mother may have been completely useless, but she at least taught me how to smack a bitch before I got here. Getting close enough to Drowzee to beat his ass down was the problem here, because between the fire that hadn't stopped chasing me, the occasional blasts of electricity that I was trying to avoid at all costs, not to mention the boulders that had just joined the party, there weren't enough openings, and I wasn't quick enough to use the ones that were being provided. It was a deadly dance that I didn't like my chances with, especially if I had to hold out until the cavalry arrived. It had been a handful of minutes already, and I'd only gotten two good hits in.

Maybe I shouldn't have run off on my own. Azurill had probably gotten everything under control before I blundered in and ruined everything for him. Hell, maybe Azurill could breathe fire. He'd could've ended this in the first minute, you don't know that.

The hairs rose on the back of my neck, and my head snapped around just before the electricity coating Drowzee's left fist fizzled out. Before I could wonder what that was all about – or hope that maybe he was starting to get a little tired – a beam of multi-coloured light burst out from his palm, carving a path through the ground beneath it as it raced in my direction.

"For fuck sakes." I mumbled under my breath, injecting some skill into the luck that had been carrying me through all the evading I had just done. Jumping into the air, I managed to avoid the beam that had been heading towards me, rolling through the air on my side and passing in between the follow-up attack that consisted of a second beam and the same cock sucking rock that Drowzee had been throwing at me this entire time.

There was a lull in the roaring maelstrom that had consumed the plateau as I landed, and in that moment of relative quiet I made out a noise that only served to fill me even more with dread.

Giggling. That crazy yellow bastard was _giggling_.

"Hey dude, what's so funny?" I wasn't really tired yet, but I would be getting to that point if this went on much longer. This was proving to be the most strenuous thing I'd done in my pitiful life, a fact that was only cemented as I dropped my head in a hasty bow and tried to ignore the hair that was being ruffled as that motherfucking boulder passed uncomfortably close over me. "You're throwing me off my dodging groove!"

"You managed to free that little kid from the trap I'd set up for him. Just the fact that you found us here is impressive, but that's where it should have ended." Drowzee's voice was as light as a feather, which provided me some disturbing juxtaposition as he gestured with his flame covered fist and I was forced into running away from up until then dormant carpet of fire. "You honestly think you can take me in by yourself? Sorry to say, but you should have run off with the kid when you had the chance. I probably wouldn't have been able to catch up to you, but now you'll end up as ashes. You probably won't even get the time to regret your hubris before I catch you, and I think that's hilarious."

No, there wasn't a chance on this green Earth that I could take him in by myself. I needed help badly if I was going to get anywhere in this fight, be it from Skitty, Krabby, a local resident, a hailstone – Fuck, I would accept Jesus at this point. Why hadn't I run with Azurill when I was given the chance? Oh, yeah, I was too busy shoving Drowzee head first into a hole in the wall. Damn it, I deserved everything that was being thrown at me right- _lightninggottaduck_.

"You trying to bore me to death? Fuck, dude, stop talking in the middle of a fight." Never let it be said that I can leave well enough alone. If I was going to die, it would be on my big-ass mouth's terms.

"I'd be doing you a favour, squirt." My scorched paw said otherwise, asshole. "You've only just started, but you would have learned with time. The clients? They ain't getting any smarter, that's for sure. The police are useless, and Arceus help you if you end having to escort someone somewhere."

I almost stopped running then, so help me, because I was actually curious where he was going with this one. Good thing fire is hot, and hot is a good reminder to keep running.

"Did you sign up, thinking they'd let you go off and find new things? Do you think that you're going to do anything that even counts as exploring? Of course you won't. You'll only ever get chores. Community service, if you will. There have been explorers since before you and I were born; you really think there's anything left out there that hasn't been found?"

Oh, I get it now. This was cruel irony. This was me in the future. A before and after picture, if you will. Well, jokes on you. I would love to be able to throw fire around, not to mention lightning and maybe – _ohshit_ _notagain_.

I was getting distressingly good at dodging electricity, ducking and curving around yet another bolt. I managed two steps towards Drowzee before I had to leap to the side and avoid the boulder, and another three before I had to disengage and figure out how to manoeuvre out of the ring of flames I had found myself in now.

I couldn't help the irritated sigh that escaped; this was the third damn time already. Crouching low to the ground, I let the glow of Quick Attack bleed out across my entire form rather than just my legs (I was starting to get lazy in maintaining it, I think. In my defence, do you understand how tedious this life or death situation was getting?), lurching towards the gap in the flames that I could see the sky through. Theoretically that was where it would be the least concentrated, and I would rather keep my fur, you understand.

Before I could even close half the distance, something drifted in front of my eyes. Crossing my pupils, I dug my heels in to slow my progress (and holy shit would my feet be hurting tomorrow), letting my brain slowly puzzle over why a _bubble_ of all things would be floating around at the top of a mountain.

It registered a moment before a second bubble floated up to join the first, followed closely by a third, and then a fourth. It was with a mystified sense of glee that I watched the bubble drift over to the wall of fire, popping with more force than the air within it should have been capable of achieving and wiping out an entire section of flame. Taking the opening that had been given to me, I bounded out of the box I had found myself in, letting out a relieved laugh as the mass that had dogged me up and down the summit was dissipated with a barrage of bubbles.

That laugh quickly turned mocking as Drowzee went flying right past me, a panting and grinning Skitty standing where he had been a second before, her head down.

"Keep him off balance." I called to both Skitty and Krabby, who was standing a fair ways away from us all. I wasn't too overtly worried about Drowzee hearing what my plan would be, it was fairly basic, exactly what would be expected from a rookie team. "If you have anything that can be used at range, do it. Clear a path and I'll end this."

With that, we just… moved.

My body blazed blue in the same moment as I kicked off, sending me halfway across the distance separating me from Drowzee. The criminal had already gotten to his feet, his entire arm dancing with electricity as he pointed at me.

There was nowhere I could go, considering I was in the air, so I was forced into doing the next best thing. As yellow light lanced out towards me, I caught it in my own palm, the volts travelling across my entire body and playing haywire with my senses. It did very little to cancel my momentum, and even less to penetrate the Endure I had employed, which left him wide open as he gathered another fist full of electricity.

With the speed that had been granted to me by whatever it was that Krabby had done, I crashed into Drowzee in a full body tackle, lashing out and hitting absolutely anything I could get to. Face, chest, groin, it didn't matter whatsoever to me as I sent the two of us to the ground and let loose on his entire body.

A pulse of what could only be described as power passing through the air around us was my only warning before an invisible force pushed against my body, passing underneath my skin and leaving searing pain absolutely anywhere that it touched. I leapt back, skipping twice across the ground to gain distance. The stone beneath my feet shifted, the spires that shot out hitting nothing but my afterimage as I darted forward, intent on finishing what I'd started.

Skitty got there before me, hopefully breaking at least one bone as she slammed full pelt into his back and sent him flying towards me. Light caught the edge of my vision, and the grin that stretched across my face was downright sadistic as I plucked Drowzee out of the air.

He'd taken some damage from my earlier assault, one eye already swollen shut and the other following not too far behind. I'd already gathered a Force Palm as he'd been heading towards me, holding it before me and detonating it as soon as he'd gotten in range. A fist coated in what felt like ice ploughed into my chest, and I heard rather than felt the rib break as I punched him in the jaw. At that point, I'd been burned. I'd been crushed. I'd been electrocuted. I'd been punched, and if I was feeling it right, I had now been a little bit frozen. I was in pain, I was starting to see spots, and I was _beyond_ pissed off.

My foot, which was oddly still on fire, connected solidly where a bruise was already starting to form, and Drowzee stumbled back once again, stubbornly silent. I had to hand it to him, he was a tough bastard, which helped mollify the small part of my mind that was worried that I'd honestly hurt him when I darted behind him with a burst of Quick Attack, sweeping his legs out from underneath him and dropping my elbow directly onto his neck as soon as he hit the ground.

And yet, he'd managed to hold himself up with his hands, and was even now struggling back to his feet. Until Krabby charged in from absolutely nowhere, clocking the outlaw for a homerun with a glowing claw and sending him directly into the crowd of bubbles he'd been blowing earlier. The explosion was magnificent, and Drowzee let out the first sound of pain of the fight, a single, muffled grunt.

It was actually difficult to follow him with my eyes as Drowzee shot across the mountaintop once again, directly in line with where Skitty was now charging. My grin spread far enough to be considered manic – she may not have been here for the entire fight, but it just felt too fitting for Skitty to be the one to knock out our first crook. Which is to say, of course, that it only made sense that something would come along and ruin it for us.

Drowzee flipped around in mid-air, fast enough to make my head spin, and thrust his hand out towards Skitty. She kind of just… stopped, right where she was, before she was sent flying through the air with a sharp cry of pain. My smile slipped off my face entirely as she disappeared over the edge of the cliff.

"Krabby, do something!" I barked, the two of us moving off at the same time. Out the corner of my eye, I could see Krabby charge right up to and then off where Skitty had plummeted, and I could only spare a single moment to hope they would both be alright before I was connecting with Drowzee again.

The punch, imbued with what felt like ten times the amount of power a regular Force Palm usually had, connected solidly with the base of Drowzee's snout, his subsequent gurgle sending vindictive pleasure through my body as I swung another punch. This one, carrying the force of the last plus another on top of it, connected with his gut and sent him skipping across the stone plateau.

Fucker bounced three times, impacting and going through one of the rocks he'd not bothered to throw at me at all this fine morning, and he _still_. _Got_. _Up_. I didn't even need to see him do it, which I wouldn't have been able to through all the dust, but I could hear it happening.

"You'll regret that!" Not to mention, I already knew what was going to happen. The cloud turned purple, and I didn't even bother looking up as I raised my arms and crossed them over my head. "Say hi to your pathetic partner for me when you join her in the afterlife!"

The impact was jarring, sending jolts down my entire body, which meant little to me. My Endure held up, and the satisfaction I took in watching Drowzee's eye widen with fear was downright vicious.

"Counter, asshole."

I didn't bother sending him flying this time; that would just mean more work for me when he inevitably got up again. His words echoed through my head as I twisted my body and slammed him into the ground, the words that had originated where they'd just entered and now refused to leave.

"Pathetic? You think Skitty is pathetic?"

I was running on little more than fumes right now. Quick Attack was harder to maintain than it looked, and I had been tagged by more than one hit before my team had managed to show up. Even then, that had been only one turning point in the proceedings. I had no idea where Skitty or Krabby had ended up, and I could only hope that they were both alright. Krabby wouldn't have gone after her if he hadn't had some sort of plan, that would just be suicide, but I couldn't help but worry.

And feel angry. Furious, even, more so than I could ever remember being in my entire life.

"Let me tell you what I think counts as pathetic. I think kidnapping children because you're too fat to fit in your own goals is pathetic."

Drowzee _cratered_ the ground as I pushed him into it, my fist aglow with raw energy. It had been present the entire time I had been in this world, but now I could feel it. Unhindered, wild, dangerous. A Force Palm lit up my fist, and Drowzee could do little more than raise his arms weakly as I detonated it against his stomach. Once he stopped moving, I would stop too, but until then he wouldn't get the chance.

The blue glow had faded from my body, but right now that was hardly a priority.

"I think whining about a life you used to lead, because you wanted all the fun with none of the responsibility that was supposed to come along with it, is pathetic."

I felt it then, a wash of that same power I had smelled just before Skitty had been sent flying, and my fury spiked. My teeth lengthening, I Bit down on the arm Drowzee had outstretched towards me, an honest to whatever they worshipped here growl rumbling down my throat as I jerked my head and listened to the bone beneath my grip shatter. Drowzee screamed through clenched teeth, his attempts to throw me off redoubling in intensity, and my teeth left his arm with a sound I can only think back upon as sickening.

"I think that an inability to rise above your own misgivings about a job you chose is pathetic. But you know what? Maybe you're right. If it were my choice, I wouldn't have joined a Guild. I wouldn't have put my neck on the line hunting down outlaws, or finding things that idiots manage to drop on their merry jaunts through dangerous as fuck caves, and you can be your ass I'm not looking forward to escorting these morons around."

But I would do it anyway, and Skitty would be right by my side. Krabby, too, so long as this experience hadn't soured him to the opportunity. He would never turn me down, though, we were fire-forged friends now. Quite literally at that. A fist covered in electricity stabbed into my side, and with a shaking arm I delivered a punch down on the criminal I was sitting on, hoping I hit something that didn't hurt enough already.

"You think exploring is pathetic? Good for you, but I'm still holding on to my faith. I'll come to understand in my own time what I think about the life I've chosen, because this is the only life open to me now. I decided, a long time ago, that living for myself was useless. That I wouldn't ever bring myself to choose to keep going, just to survive for as long as the world wanted me. If anything I ever did turned out to be an accomplishment, then good for me. That would be proof enough that I should hold on, that would be my miracle. That miracle came along two days ago, and you know what her name was? Skitty."

Drowzee shifted underneath me violently at the name; perhaps he'd already known where this had been going. At that point, I felt as though I'd only been rambling, but resolve flooded me as I raised my fist once more. Force Palm after Force Palm were plugged into Drowzee's thrashing form, which I wasn't planning on stopping until he stopped struggling. The hand he'd gotten clamped on my arm slackened slightly, and I used that opportunity to wrench myself from his grip and slam that very same elbow into his forehead.

"That's her dream, to become the greatest explorer. To find things that nobody else ever has. So what if everything has already been found? We'll just explore it all over again. We'll make maps that have more detail; I'd knock this mountain over if it gave her something new to explore, because that's my responsibility now."

Stone rose up from beside Drowzee's head, sluggish intent to spear me through the heart all too clear. The rock tapped against my chest weakly, the assault completely useless in stopping me from wrapping my hands around his throat. _If he wasn't going to stop_ – I grinned, deranged and grim, as a hand broke away from his throat to grasp at the all but limp stone – _then I would just have to stop him with force_. Even more force that I was already showing.

"Her dream is all that's keeping me here, and the more she believes in it, the more I'll believe in her. Because she can do it, and she will, even if I have to carry her to the end. So I'm going to beat the absolute shit out of you, I'm going to drag you down the mountain whether they need to restart your heart or not, and after that I'm going to collect your bounty. You better hope she's alright, because if she isn't, there's nowhere they'll be able to put you where I won't find you, I promise you that. Now go. TO. _**SLEEP**_!"

Granite, long and rather thin broke off into my hand, and with a swing fuelled with the sweet tang of vengeance I brought it down on Drowzee's head. It turned to dust in my hands as Drowzee finally slumped, and I let out a tired sigh before pushing myself away from his stupid fucking face and standing up.

I looked down at him, worried despite myself. He had only been an outlaw, maybe even a petty thief, but what if I had…?

His chest heaved, up and then down, a slow and luxurious movement.

I barely even got the time to curse his fortune before I was falling back, my body feeling equivalent to that of an enormous bruise.

 _What a fucking spectacular first outlaw mission_ , I thought to myself before blacking out, because there was always time for sarcasm.

 **XxX**

A/N: Krabby can get Agility as an Egg Move. I found that out back when I first got Black 2, by accidentally breeding a perfect 31 iv Adamant Nature Shiny Krabby with it. Hasn't happened ever before in the decade that I've been playing Pokémon, and it'll likely never happen again. Friend Krabby is based on that one, and given how utterly broken Agility is in Mystery Dungeon, I just couldn't resist. I love reading and writing stories with absurdly powerful, but still flawed and not entirely invincible characters. It's just so much fun to toe the line and find other ways to make the fic enjoyable for you all, even if the actual combat is lopsided or unfair (which it hopefully won't be, at least not beyond the precedent that Mystery Dungeon already sets). Ohh, I'm very much looking forward to the progression of this fic and how far I can push things, logically and illogically.

Oh, and three Agility's on top of a Quick Attack? Absurd. At least in theory.

I won't lie, I'm a bit drunk right now, and here's a pro-tip for you; try mixing with lemonade instead of coke. Maybe that's a no-duh for the entire world, but I'm looking at you, perhaps lone reader who doesn't know the sweet alcoholic haven that is lemonade mixed anything. You're welcome. Spread my message.

Anyway, I no longer have internet. I need to go to the library or a cafe to use it. I know, it's ridiculous, but that's what moving to an area that, ahem, 'doesn't have enough ports for the residents' apparently is. Pathetic, really. A poor showing for all involved, and I'm not just saying that because I'm going to start studying this year. So now that I'm left with literally nothing to occupy my time, have ~10k words. I don't need them.

Shorter chapter next time, most likely. Later [fellow] nerds.

 _ **X**_


	8. Chapter 8

I was awake before I hit the ground.

I let out a small 'oof' as my head bounced off a stone that had been behind me, a second or two passing before it occurred to me that I wasn't alone. Springing to my feet and feeling oddly like I hadn't just been a part of the most difficult fight I'd ever had in my life, I took a moment to actually process what I was seeing, spinning on the spot slowly as I took it all in.

It was… pretty damn impressive, to be honest. Where there had once been vegetation was now populated by smoking or outright burning stems, the smoke drifting into my nose and making my eyes water. Long trenches ran through the mountain, every trail either finishing or ending where Drowzee had been standing for most of our fight. Boulders, ranging from the size of my hand to five times the size of my body had been strewn all across the ground, most of which had been part of the cliff face that had been detonated just after I'd arrived.

In amongst the rubble, I could just make out Drowzee's body, half hidden behind a boulder. A small fire was slowly spreading across the ground towards his head, and from where I was standing, I could see that his single good eye was open and he was watching it with an expression I couldn't quite place. With a grunt, I picked my way through a particularly deep trench, ignoring the feeling of his gaze shifting on to me as I walked past him and towards the cliff side.

Sitting back and watching the fire Drowzee himself had created engulf him was tempting, and I almost fell to the desire despite it being ultimately counterproductive. I would have to drag him down the mountain either way, and no matter how little I cared for his life, I wasn't sure if we would still get paid if we only brought in a corpse. I'd go over and move him before he could get burned too badly, assuming he couldn't move himself, but right now I had more pressing matters to attend to.

"Skitty!" I would have cringed if I didn't know Drowzee was staring at me; I did _not_ like how many times my voice echoed back up to me from the chasm. "Krabby!"

I held my breath, backing away from the ledge before something suspect could happen and I was sent over it with the rest of my team. I didn't know what I was going to do if I didn't get an answer, and thankfully, I didn't need to think about it.

"Luke!" Her voice was faint, but there was very little I could confuse Skitty's voice with. The air left my lungs explosively, the relief hitting me like a freight train and forcing me down to my knees. Crawling back to the ledge, I tilted my head so my eyes were on Drowzee and my ear was hanging over the edge of the mountain. No way was I going to take any chances here. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine!" Settling my weight back onto my calves, I cupped my hands around my mouth, feeling distinctly silly in that moment. Talking to disembodied voices was always something I was open to doing, you never knew what sort of crazy things they would tell you about, but current circumstances were sort of taking all the fun out of the situation. "What about you!?"

"We're fine! Krabby… caught me? I don't exactly know what he did, but we're fine!" Ah, Krabby, never had I been happier to make someone's acquaintance before. I have no idea how much Drowzee was worth, but a third of whatever we got was definitely going to that glorious golden goofball. Pushing myself to my feet, I opened my mouth to tell them to meet me at the base of the mountain, being cut off by a new voice echoing up the cliff face.

"BZT! LUKE OF TEAM POKÉPALS, I AM OFFICER MAGMEMITE! IF I MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION?" Honestly, with how odd and difficult to understand the voice was, it kind of felt like I was listening to the lyrics of a dubstep song. Did dubstep even have lyrics? I don't know.

I scrunched my eyebrows together, even though this Magnemite guy probably couldn't see me, before they shot up in realisation. The client on Drowzee's poster had been an Officer Magnemite, hadn't it? I could distinctly remember that name, despite the fact that it had been in my vision for all of a second. "ARE YOU IN CUSTODY OF THE OUTLAW DROWZEE, BZT!?"

I glanced over my shoulder, finding that Drowzee's eye had returned to the flame that was getting closer and closer to his neck. He wasn't exactly in my custody (I had the authority to do that?), but I would be dragging him back down the mountain and collecting the bounty on him, so it was close enough. Twisting back around and staring down into the abyss, I cupped my hands over my mouth again, idly wondering in the back of my mind what this Officer Magnemite actually looked like. From the voice, I was imagining a robot.

"Yeah, I am!" My throat was beginning to hurt with how loud I was shouting, my own ears ringing with every echo that assaulted them. Apart from that, my body was conspicuously free of pain, which in my fit of curiosity I decided to test by windmilling the arm that had been clipped by a boulder earlier and had been developing a nasty bruise. The bone creaked slightly from the sudden movement, but apart from that, nothing.

Hmm. How very odd. And convenient.

"EXCELLENT, BZT!" It may have just been the impression I was getting, but everything this Magnemite guy was saying to me was starting to sound a little sarcastic. It may have just been the absolute monotone buzzing quality, though, I didn't know that. "WE SHALL MAKE OUR WAY UP TO YOU, BZT! PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE!"

A pained cough from behind me drew my attention away from the abyss I was screaming at, drawing my attention to Drowzee as he clutched at his shoulder with a bloodied hand. The arm he hadn't moved, the one I had broken, was leaking blood like a fountain, thin rivers trailing from the holes shaped perfectly like my teeth and painting the ground beneath him red. My stomach dropped as Drowzee twitched and something cracked, his groan of discomfort being swallowed back to the best of his abilities and _why was I feeling fucking concerned for him_?

Aaaaarrrrrggghhhh, damn this newfound conscious. Damn it to Hell and back, just so I could damn it all over again and _laugh_ as it _burned_ in the _fiery pits of_ _ **brimstone**_ _and_ _ **HELLFIRE**_.

Swearing up a storm under my breath, I pushed myself back to my feet, idly hoping that my silence didn't give my team and the cops the wrong idea. Maybe it would make them hurry up and get here quicker if they thought something had happened to me, but right now I need to get rid of this mounting feeling of guilt before I was forced to acknowledge that this place had fucked me over more than I had originally thought.

I wasn't doing this because I wanted to, or because I had to, or because it was expected of me now. I was doing it because…uh… fuck. Conversation over, shut up.

Reaching into my bag as I began my trek back over to the guy I'd just handed his own ass to on a silver platter, I sifted through its contents, pushing all sorts of items out of the way as I searched for the bandages that had been in there when I'd first gotten it. About halfway there, my finger brushed against something smooth and cold, sending a jolt down my spine when it became clear to me that the energy I had been feeling from nigh-everything ever since waking up on the beach was very conspicuously absent from it.

My Reviver Seed looked odd, far smaller than it had been and giving off the distinct impression of being almost… empty. None of the power I had felt within its shell when I first bought it had remained, so it was either spent or a dud. I shrugged, muttering "carpe diem" to myself as I tossed it into my mouth and bit down. It had been a while since the last time I ate, especially considering how many calories I was probably burning at this rate. The last thing I needed in my life was passing out due to hunger.

Drowzee flinched away as I kneeled down beside him, his eye widening upon seeing me retrieve the bandages right from the bottom of my bag, where they had been buried under a weird blue berry that I had been meaning to ask Skitty about.

"Any funny business," I grumbled at him, unrolling a generous amount of plain white gauze and ripping it with my teeth. After a moment's hesitation, during which I attempted to figure out if what had happened to my leg earlier had been my doing or not, my foot erupted into flames, the bandage being passed through it in some poor mockery of sterilisation, "and I'll kick your face off."

Drowzee's arm was an absolute mess. The taste of his blood was still fresh in my mouth, the bone clearly visible to me through the largest chunk of flesh I'd Bit asunder. A small river of blood was flowing freely from his snout and the corner of his mouth, neither of which I could really do much about without first taking a crash course in anatomy and medicine. As it stood, there was little doubt in my mind that something internal had been damaged pretty heavily, which filled me with some weird amalgamation of pride and nausea.

"...How?" Drowzee grunted as I started wrapping his arm, the gauze already stained red before I'd even managed a full rotation. I was too focused on his arm to know whether he was looking at me, and certainly too preoccupied to pick up on his tone.

Running out of bandage, I pulled the strip I was still holding taut, glancing around for something I could use to hold it in position while I forced Drowzee's shoulder back into its socket. Dislocations were nasty; I had no idea when or how it happened, or whether or not I should have even tried touching it, but we all know I was going to anyway. "Eh, I dunno. Might take me a few tries. Maybe some steel toed boots and a good run up-"

"No." Drowzee cut me off, staring up at me with what I assume was some difficulty. His good eye's bruising was starting to catch up to the one that I'd punched shut, which really sucked for him. Belatedly, I noticed that there was a stone digging into the base of his neck, a problem I fixed by hopping over his stomach and nudging him with my foot that wasn't on fire until I'd managed to shimmy him out of the way. "You said you only knew her for two days… how could you possibly already be so devoted?"

I frowned, glancing up towards his face and catching his eye. For a split second, his pupil glowed, and suddenly I found myself falling back, my brain feeling like it was simultaneously convulsing and trying to find a way out of my skull. Through the haze of white hot scalding _pain_ I heard Drowzee yelp, something in or around his body cracking as he flinched away. The knee I had been balancing on gave out, and it was only pure luck that I managed to stick my arms out and stop myself from expertly and ferociously attacking the ground with my chin, which was what the plan totally was, don't worry about it.

"I don't fucking believe it." Drowzee grunted, a distinct, new bulge under the bandages that I'd wrapped around his arm. "The first time the Dimensional Scream has been seen in centuries, and it's the Aura adept who just beat me! Man, I hope I'm there when your head pops like a grape-"

That was as far as he got before I stumbled to my feet, hopping over his stomach and spinning around in mid-air. My Flame Foot (name pending) connected solidly with his cheek, his body rolling over twice and his head bouncing off the ground. He didn't move, barely even breathing if the slow and shallow movements of his chest could be believed, and with one hand slowly kneading into my forehead I fell to the ground, my tailbone alighting a rock that somehow felt comfortable to my throbbing brain.

What, did he think I wouldn't actually do it?

Settling down to wait for the cavalry, I blew out an annoyed breath, running circles within my own mind as I tried to figure out why I had decided to try being nice in the first place. It was unfortunate that I couldn't quite manage to commit to my threat; Drowzee's face had been kicked in, not exactly off, but I stopped caring about that the second it entered my mind. The words 'dimensional' and 'scream' came to the forefront of my abused cortices then, and with a grunt I settled back against the ground and threw an arm over my eyes.

I didn't want to think. At that point, the sun was too bright, and every glob of my gray matter needed some time to recalibrate after whatever they had just been subjected to.

 **XxX**

"WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!?"

Skitty almost fell off the ladder above me at Chatot's screech, the rungs wobbling slightly as she fought to regain her balance. I wasn't quite so lucky, the shout having caught me while I only had one hand and foot securing me, and I fell with a curse, bouncing off the ground and righting myself in the air to slide to a halt in front of the Outlaw Board. Chatot was on me in a second, pretty much teleporting in front of me in a flurry of feathers and waving his wings frantically.

"I SEND YOU TO CAPTURE AN OUTLAW AND YOU CHOOSE A TWO STAR FELON!?" Chatot flapped around me, inspecting me from every angle before moving over to Skitty. "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW BADLY IT WOULD REFLECT ON THE GUILD IF YOU DIED ON YOUR SECOND MISSION!? ROOKIES TAKE THE D-RANKS, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT!"

Skitty shrank back, gulping nervously as Chatot swooped in close to her face to inspect the small cut on her cheek. It was the only injury she had been subjected to, despite the long fall. Krabby was much the same, and because Skitty hadn't actually gotten a chance to see what he had done and Krabby wasn't feeling like it would be necessary to tell us, I was left with the entirely understandable assumption that Krabby was in fact the magical Chosen One of destiny. I would be shocked if I was incorrect.

Speaking of Krabby, Chatot had moved on from Skitty, having turned to my brand new crustacean compatriot with a raised eyebrow. At least I assume he had an eyebrow raised, the subject was much like Skitty and eyes in general. "And you are?"

"Krabby is Krabby."

Chatot held eye contact for a moment longer, obviously waiting in vain for Krabby to continue, before blinking and turning towards me. The smile I plastered on my face made him narrow his eyes, a tiny drop of sweat making its way down the side of my face as he growled out, "well?"

"In my defence…" I didn't actually have anything to defend myself with, so I settled with edging my way to the ladder and blurting out the first thing that came to my mind; "only one of us was thrown off the cliff."

" _CLIFF!?_ "

I was already in a Quick Attack before Chatot's eyes had the chance to finish their initial twitch, hurtling back towards the ladder and taking the rungs two at a time. "Goingtothedojodon'twaitup!" I hollered over my shoulder, expertly ignoring Skitty's betrayed expression as I charged for the front doors and leapt for one of the larger gaps in the wood.

I slid through the gap with the poise of an Olympic swimmer and bounced over the grate, landing on my face twice before I got my feet back underneath me. I'd already given a statement to the police when Drowzee had been taken into custody ("no, officer, I have no idea why his cheek is taking longer to bruise than the rest of him."), which meant that strictly there was no real reason I was needed to recap the trainwreck that was our assignment, which only left me hoping that Skitty would have enough presence of mind to hide behind Krabby and wait out the inevitable storm.

Why was Chatot so annoyed over what we had done, anyway? Eh, maybe he was just disappointed that I wasn't the one with the injury.

Accidentally showering an oddly coloured panda with dirt as I turned around the bend in the road, I continued down towards town, slowing my pace until I was only just running a little faster than average. It wouldn't do to waste any energy before entering a dojo of all things, that would just be silly.

People waved at me as I entered Treasure Town, only most of them being someone I'd already seen before. I returned them all with far less enthusiasm, my eyes zeroing in on the building I had been heading for. Just like everything else in town, the top was shaped out into what I assumed was the likeliness of the shopkeeper, which is to say, bones. A skull, a few what could have maybe been femurs (I wasn't very good with bones), and a plume of feathers sticking out above the entire thing.

There was something odd about this building. An energy of sorts, that's the closest word I could think of to describe it. Despite there being nothing obstructing my view inside, there was nothing inside but an all-encompassing emptiness, which made my eyes ache whenever I tried to look further into it.

As I watched, a small leaf bounced across the ground, carried by a breeze too light for me to even feel. It crossed the threshold into the building, and even by the standards this place was setting, that's when things got a little bit _weird_.

I could feel the leaf was still there. The energies of this place… they were sort of like blood, except everything had it. The people, the ground, and even the air. The leaf was barely an entity to the tiny bubble I could even acknowledge as my perception, which I would always find myself ignoring. It just wasn't a big enough fixture in my life, even though it came to me as naturally as breathing. This building, though, was different from that.

The air in the entrance rippled, patterns convulsing from hypnotic to nauseating and back once more. Blue and gray lines that I couldn't actually see spread across to each side of the building, jolting towards me as I took a breath and dusting against the hands I raised up automatically to protect my face. The energy filling me became... _easier_ , flowing faster and stronger, every push it sent against my veins clearing some of the fog that was settled over the insides of the building.

It was like whatever was inside wanted me to see it, but only on its terms. Its terms were that I focused, which I set my mind to before taking a step forth. There was a crunch underneath my feet as I entered the building, the Aura I had felt in the leaf that had just been stepped on spreading out to mingle with the air and ground, the world shifting around me and plunging me into darkness.

Immediately, I whirled around, stopping short at what I could see. Outside had been turned into a vat of shades, colourless rocks floating in the air with not even a shadow to prove their existence. Trees were frozen in place, gripped within the throes of a gust, the ground cracked; torn asunder, the sun nothing but a pathetic pinprick in the sky, barely a disturbance to the dead world I was bearing witness to.

I reached out, my hand stopping short as a mass of blue and gray lines flickered into existence. I pushed against them harder, my breath short, my desperation to get back out of this building and find Skitty and Krabby and _figure out what the fuck had just happened to the_ _planet_ filling my body and weighing down my lungs. Aura gathered in my palm, the lines bunching together and thickening in the face of my imminent assault, my arm tense and preparing for the destabilisation of a Force Palm when someone behind me coughed.

"Oh my. Are you perhaps… a customer?"

 **XxX**

Ridiculous threats are my favourite threats to make. Mainly because if the character goes through with them, or at least makes an attempt, they're almost always funny. Anyway, I've got plans for Drowzee (and he's still important to the game plot regardless), so anyone who was maybe hoping he'd just rot in prison or something, my apologies. Still, Luke's first attempt of showing compassion to an enemy pretty much fails spectacularly. Nice job setting a precedent, Drowzee, ya dick.

Anyway, this is the official return to 'regular' length chapters. Not all chapters can have 4k word fight scenes, after all. Doubtlessly the chapters will steadily grow in length as more needs to be added to them, but for the moment, I hope you've enjoyed reading thus far. See you next time I update!

 _ **X**_


	9. Chapter 9

People don't tend to give panic enough credit as an emotion.

Always, whenever a situation would turn dire, you would inevitably hear the words. "Don't panic, panicking will get us nowhere," blah blah etcetera. Stymied would be out opportunity to react to whatever danger we were in, our choices torn from us in our state of momentary woe. Never would the story be any different, the villain being the very emotional response that made us human. Or Pokémon. Whatever.

Nobody would ever suggest that perhaps panic was useful. Not even a whisper of how much it could help once it was nothing but a silent, intangible force.

When I turned around the dead husk the world had become behind me, I didn't start to panic. I was too busy being confused. No, panic had set in once I turned _back_ and came face to face with a skull holding a bleached white club, and with that panic came along something incredibly useful and more than a little intriguing.

The eyes in the skull were staring at me. Not in some sort of deranged happiness or anger that I would have been expecting, but with wonder. His body was alight with genuine happiness, something which I never would have figured out on my own had I not allowed that momentary flash of panic to take over and expel that strange life energy inside of me outwards.

I had suspected it to be possible, so all that I had done was push a hypothesis into the testing phase. Staring at me in the eye was someone who could quite possibly have been beside themselves with delirious and likely homicidal joy, or maybe, and this is going to sound completely insane but hear me out, he was actually happy to see someone other than himself inside of the building.

Not that I could even fault him, the view was kind of shit.

I know it wouldn't help my plea of sustained sanity if I mentioned that I managed to calm down quite quickly, with my hand still on the invisible barrier keeping me inside the building with the skull staring at me blocking the only other entrance I could see that would grant me some distance. I could feel it, in the atmosphere of the room itself, that I wouldn't be in any danger for the time being, and maybe, just maybe, my answers would come to me easier if I didn't give in to the impulse to just start screaming.

The impulse was powerful. The fight I had with it was legendary. Alas, exposing those events to anything too normal to appreciate the true enormity of those scant moments would be a disservice to the universe that had held together so wonderfully underneath all the pressure I had expounded upon it.

Sorry about that.

"I was recommended by my Guild's head of intelligence. Name's Luke." Keeping my eyes on the guy before me, I twisted my body to the side slowly, partly so I could gesture behind myself comfortably and mostly to present a smaller target if I was wrong and about to be murdered horrendously. You had to think about these things, after all. "Care to tell me exactly what it is I'm looking at?"

Technically, what exactly I was looking at was the guy's face, which he didn't seem to feel the need to point out as he ambled towards me slowly. The wonder had faded, something like resignation rushing forth to fill its place as who I was assuming was the owner of the dojo stared over my shoulder with tired eyes.

His attention was actually unnerving. Just being near it made it feel like my spine was trying to crawl its way out of my back. And I was here on orders from Chatot to willingly subject myself to it for who knows how long, on a consistent basis.

Joy.

"Fear shouldn't hold any place within you here. Time shall build, just as it has destroyed." Was I afraid? I hadn't even realised.

I raised an eyebrow and nodded along, pretending I had any inkling of what the Hell he was talking about as I slowly edged away further down the wall. Dem Bones didn't seem to notice, tilting his head to the side and tapping the ground idly with his club. "The future grows brighter with each passing second."

That sentence made me pause, craning my neck across the meagre distance I had travelled to take another look out the door. I don't know what he was looking at, but if I wanted to proceed here then I had to choose between one of two options. Either the landscape had somehow looked worse at some point in time before than it did now, or that club was positioned in just the right way to hide how incredibly hard the dojo's owner was getting as he stared at the scene.

Oh, if he turned out to be a nightmare fetishist before I even got started on what I had been sent here to do, I was going to be very upset.

I don't know why I decided on the first option. I'm pretty sure the dinosaurs at ground zero were treated to less of a shitstorm of a view a few seconds after the meteor had hit home. Actually, I knew exactly why I chose the first option. It would let me sleep at night. Ignorance was bliss, because when was the last time you saw someone who was both happy and knew what was going on?

"Interesting…" I almost shit myself as someone's breath washed over my neck, a fist lashing out on instinct to sock whoever had snuck up on me. It hit something solid, and before I knew what was happening I had been spun around to stare directly at the gleaming skull of the room's only other occupant.

Quickly, I glanced over my shoulder, only to find nobody there. One, the fuck; Two, why did this feel familiar?

"An amateur Aura adept with an apprehensive grasp on the applicable properties of the Dimensional Scream? What an odd specimen you are." Something I couldn't see tapped against my stomach, a feeling of bitter cold and blistering warmth erupting from that focal point to cover my entire body. At least, that's what I assume it would feel like, and just saying 'fucking bizarre' really wouldn't be doing the sensation justice. "I see, yes… no formal training!?"

Calcium Club took a very big step away from me, as if I was set to detonate at any second. And for all I knew, maybe I was. A voice in my head was telling me that maybe it wasn't so bad, but really, if I made a habit out of listening to the voices in my head I would have dyed my fur pink and started calling myself Wendy. Not all of them were trustworthy, after all.

"What am I looking at right now?" I cut in before he could get started talking again, a risk I had to take considering I couldn't see his mouth. Staring him dead in the eye in an attempt to make him understand just how much I wanted an answer, I stabbed a finger back towards the doorway, the finger ending up close enough to attract a few errant blue sparks. Rude of me? Definitely. Did I give a shit? Nope.

Insert Name Related to Bones glanced between me and the doorway, tapping his club against the ground incessantly. I'd like to imagine that he had been biting his lip in contemplation and he considered giving me an answer, but I doubt that was what had been happening underneath that skull. He was under no obligation to give me tell me shit; I was encroaching on his territory here. He held all the power.

"Past, present, and future. All branched from the same path, denounced from any reality at any given moment to form their own continuum." The club scraped across the ground before my feet, the noise echoing through the building. I hardly payed it any attention, electing instead to make an attempt at comprehending what I was being told. "Perhaps it should be explained as a blank circle, containing all and nothing at once, as one. What you are looking at is my present, and if I were to wager, your future."

…Huh?

"…Huh?"

"But enough listening to my millennial ramblings." Femur Fondler went from staring out the door to having my arm in his grip fast enough to make my head spin. His skin was fucking freezing cold, which somehow didn't make me feel any better about the situation as I was dragged across the room, towards the doorway that I was praying didn't open up into a sex dungeon. Or any kind of dungeon, for that matter. "You're here in search of knowledge, are you not?"

"I literally just asked you a ques-"

"Good! Now go forth and find what you seek!" Something slammed against my back, shoving me towards the doorway that I could have sworn had been so much further away a moment ago. My head bounced off the side with a 'doink' that felt more insulting than painful, forcefully pushing away any words I could have used in the situation and leaving me with nothing but the lingering feeling of unbridled rage.

Huh, there was a light in here, and literally nothing else. How could this _not_ end well?

"Marowak Dojo is not responsible for any injuries a person or people suffer while on or inside their grounds." The light engulfed me as I stumbled into it, leaving me with nothing for company besides Marowak's voice. I'm glad I at least got the name; the shallow grave I was going to be digging after this deserved that at least. "Usage of any equipment that results in debilitating harm to a body or death will be laughed off with a suggestion that the trainee in question should have tried harder. Side effects of using Marowak Dojo may include dizziness, shortness of breath, temporary blindness, inability to use the word purple in a sentence, permanent blindness, growth of a really sick beard, a strange fascination with bones, getting swoll, slight insemination, death, and fates worse than death. Please keep out of reach of children. If symptoms persist then try harder; strong people don't get sick."

Aaaaand darkness.

 **XxX**

I'm so glad I didn't tire myself out earlier today by climbing a mountain at Mach speed right before taking on an outlaw way above my pay-grade- oh, wait a minute.

How did that story with the never ending maze go? Wasn't there supposed to have been a Minotaur or something in the middle? Yeah, get rid of the Minotaur and you had my current situation. For fuck sakes, _please_ get rid of the Minotaur to have my current situation, I did not want to have to deal with that.

The place I found myself shoved into had no entrance. Seriously, one minute I was staring at a blank light, the next I was in the centre chamber of what I would soon find to be a fucking enormous maze. There had been two openings; I'd tried one for a minute to see where it went, turned around, and now I was hopelessly lost.

That had been hours ago. No, I wasn't exaggerating, I'd actually been in here for hours. I was tired, I was hungry, I needed to pee like nobodies' business, and above all else I was seriously starting to get bored of seeing nothing but the same damn walls over and over again.

I had been in the middle of cursing what was probably the amoeba that would eventually shit out Marowak's ancestor, having surely run out of generations at that point, before I came across my first adversary. It had been blue, its head had been extremely hard, and it had set me on motherfucking _fire_.

The flame had been so small too. Barely more than a tine ember, which had then gone on to melt halfway through the floor. Half the fur on my ass was just gone, beyond ash and debris the last time I thought I saw it, and there had been no reprieve from whatever I was going up against here. Every corner I turned spawned a new group of them, some of which I recognised from around town and the Guild, most of which I didn't, and all of which I never wanted to see ever again.

The first spine I had broken with a Force Palm, I had freaked out somewhat. The only reason I had been able to keep going was that the dog thing had then gone on to dissolve into those little blue lines that I had seen when I tried going back out through the door, and that fear that I'd actually killed something was replaced with mind-numbing anger and several broken bones to whatever had been unfortunate enough to come across me next. Something that looked like a short human with a tail and bulging muscles, I think.

I had been in the middle of tearing some magnet this with a single eye in half (and I swear if I hear any jokes about positives or negatives I was going to tear my own arm off) when my stomach had groaned for what was probably the millionth time, and I snapped.

"SON OF A FUCKING WHORE!" My throat hurt like Hell; probably something to do with the vine about two hours back that had come within breathing distance of slicing it entirely open, and before I could even take another breath I was tasting blood. Picking up a stone that must have been knocked loose when I slammed a ghost (at this point I was beyond caring) wearing a necklace into it a few minutes ago, I caved in the skull of the little blue elephant that had been charging me from behind, giving precisely zero attention to the blue threads that splattered over my arms and disappeared just as quickly. "MAROWAK, I'VE BEEN IN HERE FOR-FUCKING-EVER! WHERE THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO FUCKING BE GOING!?"

I wasn't expecting an answer. I hadn't gotten one over the course of my duration in this maze, for all I knew there wasn't an option of giving me one. At that point I was just screaming for the sake of screaming, so imagine my surprise when I actually got a response.

You don't even have to imagine it. I tripped over and a yellow sheep sent a bolt of lightning into my left leg. I barely felt it, probably the result of my brain converting the pain into irritation or something equally as stupid.

"You must ascend beyond the challenge, and navigate yourself to the next step in life." Marowak's voice served as background music as I continued my way through the crowd that was blocking my path. Let me tell you, you have no idea how much force it takes to punch right through something's head with Aura. I, on the other hand, know all too well. "If it makes you feel any better, you've been extremely close to the exit several times already. Had you taken a left three hundred and seventy-eight turns ago, you would have discovered it."

"Oh, yeah, that makes me feel _great_." Three hundred turns ago? I couldn't even remember if I had gone left or right two turns ago! With a wordless growl, I shoved a two headed bird to the ground, using it as a springboard to leap over a jet of water that had been coming at me from the side. Its toothpick neck gave way under my foot, a shiver going down my spine when I both heard and _felt_ it happen. "Say, is there any _other_ way to get out of here? One that won't kill me before I manage it?"

"…You could always die. Your physical body will reappear before the light, and if you're in tune enough with your own spiritual power then there should be no complications."

Seeing an opportunity, I kicked off the ground, pulsing into a Quick Attack as I bounced off the wall and shot towards the corner in front of me. Flames licked a my heels, something I found disturbingly easy to ignore as I glared up at the grey tiles that made up the ceiling. Marowak's voice was echoing, probably audible throughout the entire maze, so the chances of him actually seeing my expression as I rolled around the corner and tore ass up the new corridor was a crapshoot.

At this point, it wasn't even making me feel better. Then again, my head felt like shit, my stomach and my bladder had swapped sizes, my legs and arms weren't literally on fire this time but it felt like they were, and the only thing that was keeping me going was the desire to just get through this and go home.

Home. To the Guild. To see Skitty, listen to Chatot bitch at me, and sleep. That was it.

"And if my 'spiritual power' isn't good enough?" I wasn't going to go through with it. Kill myself after this bullshit maze had failed? Not on your life. Still, it was something I wanted to know more about, because if things continued like they had been since I was shoved in here, the choice wasn't going to end up being mine in the end. Besides, despite everything, I was curious; how did something like that even work? What cues would you take to come to that conclusion?

"You have managed to survive within the maze for the past thirty-five hours, young Aura Guardian." My feet suddenly weren't underneath me anymore. I only noticed when I was skidding across the ground on my chin, the impact slamming my teeth together and throwing my head through a loop. The world was too much for me at that point; I'm not even sure if it was only just stubborn pride that made me swallow the bile back down. "Despite the building growing more powerful along with you, you've been proven to employ spiritual power in drove-"

"A day?" A tooth fell out of my mouth, closely followed by a small stream of blood. Pushing myself up onto elbows, I didn't bother questioning why the temperature was beginning to rise, electing to just stare at the blood painting the ground beneath me without actually seeing any of it. "I've been in here for a day and a half?"

What would everyone have been thinking right now? I had been gone, missing, completely out of sight for more than a day. That would mean Skitty had gone to sleep and woken up with an empty bed beside her twice. Six meals that I hadn't had the chance to partake in. Had I even told anyone where I had been going? My brain felt too numb to even offer up an answer, just as tired as my body was after a full day of nonstop fighting.

"No. A day suggests that time has passed. This is the Marowak Dojo, a branch that has fallen from the tree and resides forgotten to all those who neglect to seek it. Time as you recall has no requirement or basis here." Something above me screeched, the noise driving a stake through my already abused cranium. "Ah, that now marks thirty-six hours. Curious, isn't that the exit right before you?"

My breath caught in my throat. Agony ripped through my chest. One of the bones in my neck cracked painfully as my head shot up.

It took a moment, but eventually I decided that I didn't care. Not about the pain, or the blood still running from my lip. Not even about the massive phoenix in front of me or the curtain of molten death bearing down onto me. All I had eyes for was the cylinder of light that it was hovering above.

The kanji shaped fire touched down. I threw myself into a Quick Attack, the ground crumbling as I pushed off it.

Vision failed me. As did hearing, and touch, and consciousness in general.

 **XxX**

I must have looked a sight.

Waking up in front of the Dojo had been a chore. My body hadn't wanted to respond, and honestly, I couldn't blame it. The only reason I was roused was the insistent pecking of a bird that apparently didn't know when to fucking _leave someone alone_.

It had asked me something. I only knew because I had seen its beak move up and down, and the expectant expression that had followed. I hadn't – couldn't hear anything at all, choosing instead to stumble away and try to make my way to the only safe place I knew before I passed out again. Too bad I would have to go up a _mountain_.

I had only looked behind myself once, a bleak attempt to make any sense of what I had just been a part of, to see the meaning behind any of the metaphors. A pile of rubble had been there to greet me, offering nothing in terms of the knowledge that I had been supposed to seek out for myself.

I only made two stops along the way. The first was to finally empty my bladder against an unfortunate tree, and the second was to empty the bile of my stomach into a bush two steps away from the puddle I had been responsible for. My vision swam as I stumbled onto the grate, one foot catching the back of the other on my way through the gate and sending me sprawling.

If I had the energy, I probably would have laughed at what I must have looked like, tripping over myself and ending up going headfirst down the ladder leading into the Guild. In my current condition, all I was granted was a split second glance at everyone's faces as I plummeted, landing with a painful sounding crack on my head.

Someone called my name as darkness rushed forth. It might not have even been my name; at that point, I couldn't even tell what language they were speaking.

You know, I think my only regret was never getting the chance to start on that shallow grave.

 **XxX**

From a philosophical standpoint, time is as contradictory as it is ordered. If the universe is my sandbox, time is the shovel I'm using to shape my sandcastles. Trust me, I'm having a lot of fun here, and so long as nothing collapses, the view you'll be treated to might just be impressive. Of course, I'm much more likely to screw everything up, but what's life without a little risk? This isn't even real life, so there's not even any real risk, either. I love it when everything works together perfectly.

So, as of writing this, Exploring the Clouds just broke 1000 views. Not as impressive as some of my other stories, sure, but something that makes me happy all the same. Thank you very much, everyone who has read even this far. I write this for you just as much as I write it for me.

Next up will be the waterfall, if I recall correctly. Fun, fun, fun. One of these days I'll get a chapter out before a month passes. That day is not today.

 _ **X**_


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N:** Added to a Community? 1500 views? Not bad, not bad at all.

* * *

Waking up after getting the shit beaten out of you was never fun.

"-Spinal column very nearly severed entirely, four fractured ribs, two _broken_ ribs, a hairline fracture running through every bone on his right side, severe strain on every major muscle in his body…"

My eyes remained stubbornly shut as a voice I was only vaguely familiar with continued to draw the verbal equivalent of a flip book showing me getting my nuts kicked into the back of my asshole. There was an odd chime present, noticeable mainly on the vowels, what was it… Ah, Chimecho! That's right, I totally knew that.

"… A large patch of missing fur along his lower back and thighs as well as everything in between, a concussion, so many burst blood vessels in his left eyes that I'll be amazed if he can ever use it again…"

Wow. Those blue lines really messed me up. That's fine, though, you should see the other guys. All hundreds upon hundreds of them, they are literally a splatter against a wall that I'll likely never be able to find in my life.

"… And he should make a full recovery before we know it!"

Oh. That was nice to know. It was also kind of sad to hear, because I don't know what kind of painkillers they were pumping into me, but I wanted about four times the dosage for personal usage. I mean, everything still hurt like Hell, but the kaleidoscope behind my eyes was seriously retro.

It was probably cocaine. That stuff was known for sending you back to when everything looked like the seventies.

"He was dead on his feet when he came in! How could be possibly be alright so soon!?"

Ah, so Skitty was here too. Vaguely, I wondered when it was that I'd actually managed to get back, before finding myself being dragged back on track by the sheer hysteria in her voice. She really needed to figure out a way to chill, I felt fine.

I felt like everything was currently being dipped in molten lava and stuffed full of needles, but wasn't that a regular side effect of the seventies?

"I've been pumping Wish after Wish into him since we got him stabilised." Ah, Wish. I hope I could learn that move. I would make me give me superpowers… that I already have! Oh, man, this was some good stuff. Where was I, anyway? "His body has been exceptionally receptive to my energy, though there is something which I find odd. I know it's not Synthesis or Rest, what's happening seems to be running perpendicular to the effects I've observed those moves to have. Can Riolu learn Recover, or barring that, is the species known for having a regenerative ability?"

New goal in life. Attain claws and a metallic skeleton, change my name to Logan, become the Honey Badger or whatever the fuck that comic is called.

"Do you suspect internal assistance?"

Huh. Was that Chatot's voice? D'aww, I knew he cared. Or he just didn't want the Guild getting sued and had a pillow on call for when I get a little unruly. Clever move, I would sue the shit out of this place if I had any idea how the law worked.

"That's the thing, I'm quite certain that without this internal assistance, there is a good chance that Luke would have been dead before he even managed to get back from wherever he was. I have no clue how anyone can get this injured in less than ten minutes, but I suppose it's plausible with his attitude. What unfortunate luck he must have, running into a Pokémon that's so quick to anger."

Wait, ten minutes? No, I'm pretty sure I can at least dodge for ten minutes. I mean, that fight with Drowzee must have gone on for at least fifteen… years. Such an extremely powerful adversary, that Drowzee was. Thankfully I had assistance for all of two minutes before beating his ass into the ground.

Holy crap, something was wrong with me today. I know that sticking to one train of thought isn't something I seem capable of at the best of times, but apparently, having your head screwed on backwards by a stone wall was detrimental to brain functionality. Who knew?

But oh well, this was getting boring, and I obviously wasn't about to fall asleep again when my still warm corpse was being poked.

"I guess that just means I'm more incredible than anyone was giving me credit for."

All noise in the room paused for a moment, giving me ample time to push myself off the straw that I had been unconscious over. It should also be worth noting, however, that in that moment I became aware of something.

I could feel the tips of my ears hurting.

Why was that worth noting in the first place?

Because in that moment, my world was also nothing but white hot, searing PAIN. Which I handled with all the poise and grace of a B-list movie actress.

I screamed like the horror movie monster was nipping at my blond, naked and thoroughly toned ass, falling flatter against the mattress than my acting as I prayed this wouldn't be the moment that I was remembered for. Also, I may have been crying a little bit, I'm not sure.

"Luke!"

I thrashed in response to Skitty's voice. Because what else am I supposed to do in this situation? My tongue was too busy attempting to swallow itself.

"Please remain still, having someone die on me via their own actions would be horrible for my self-esteem!"

Much of the pain chose that moment to vacate my body. Or it had just increased to such a level that my nerve endings were calling it quits on me. It may have been something I had done, or the result of outside interference and assistance, but I like to think that it had more to do with the crippling indignity that flooded my body better than any morphine at Chimecho's declaration.

"You're a bizarre one." Lying on my back and staring at the ceiling wasn't the best position to survey a room from, but I managed well enough. I couldn't see shit beyond the ceiling and the pink head that took up more than half of what was left, but sight wasn't necessary when you had such fine auditory clues. "Oh hey, Chatot, thanks for sending me into that death trap. My ass still hurts from how hard that building rammed it."

"I relayed specific instructions to Marowak to ease you into a beneficial routine." Chatot's head poked its way into my vision. He was doing a marvellous job of keeping his face in one piece as Skitty attempted to melt it with the fiercest glare I had ever seen her produce. "I was expecting you, with all your posturing, would be able to handle something as simple as the initial test."

 _That_ was the initial test? Alright, you know what, fuck grinding the dojo and its apparent displacement in time for extra hours in the day and supreme strength.

Grinding. Such an odd term. I didn't even know if I was using it right, the few times I'd seen it was on the Internet whenever I managed to sneak myself into the local library. Ah, the Internet. Such a strange place.

"Yeah, I dunno what kind of wunderkind you take me as, but I sure as shit wasn't eased into anything in that day and a half I was trapped in that maze." Chatot's eyes narrowed in a way that led me to believe he'd just furrowed his eyebrows, his beak cracking open to do… something. I don't know. "Ah! Hang on a tick, I've been running my ass into the ground to avoid having to kill myself for more than thirty hours straight, I need to vent for a moment and seeing as the only options are you, my partner, and the person who has apparently been putting all the effort into keeping me breathing, that duty falls onto you."

"Krabby is here too."

I jumped at the sudden voice.

Ow.

"Oh. So you are." Or his disembodied voice was, and everyone was playing along. Honestly, I wouldn't put that past Krabby. "I figured you would have gone back to the beach or whatever."

"Krabby wants to join Luke and Skitty and be an adventurer on Team Poképals."

I didn't actually hear what he said in that moment, more white noise with something meaningful behind it that was entirely lost to my ringing ears. But it couldn't possibly have been that bad, right?

"Sure thing, buddy. You were awesome back on that mountain." Nailed it. "Now, what was I… ah, right. YOU!" I stabbed a finger in the direction Chatot's head had disappeared. I think I actually could hear the muscles in my arm screaming at the movement, but they would just have to suck it up. "You sent me to a guy that threw me through a light. That's pretty minor, but do you have any idea what superstitions surround walking into light back where I come from? I thought I was dead! Do you have any idea how hard it is to punch through someone's head with a Force Palm!? My ass in naked! I mean yeah, I'm going to go back because I feel strong as fuck after that and this might be the start of a debilitating addiction, but I had to get past a bird that was on _fire_! And it was really big and it breathed fire too!"

Suffice to say I had a lot of grievances about what I had just done. Even though I could have given up at any time and presumably been fine, but don't give that madhouse excuses!

"Luke… are you saying you managed to get through the Final Maze on your first try?"

Final Maze. How fucking fitting.

"I wasn't aware there was another try after the first one! Death trap, remember? And don't you change the subject on my injured-"

"Luke, the Final Maze will only allow you to keep going if you want nothing else than to find the end." You know, it was beginning to occur to me that I would be a much happier person if I just yelled a lot more often and was an even bigger nuisance in general that I was already presenting myself to be. Maybe then I could get someone to listen when I tell them what they're saying is stupid. "It is the ultimate test of endurance and willpower. Tell me the truth; did you manage to find your way out on the first try?"

"I'm surprised Skitty's not already world famous with how long it took me, but yes, I completed the stupid maze on the first try." Wow, the ceiling sure was an interesting sight. I'm so glad Skitty had gone somewhere else and left me with nothing to look at but part of a hollowed mountain. Can you sense the sarcasm in that statement? I just want to make sure because it was, like, super-duper subtle. "I'm not seeing how this is a big-"

"I need you to focus right now, Luke." I'd be having chicken for dinner tonight, asshole. I was actually a medical anomaly, my patience was actually directly tied to my current state of being, that which was severely injured and non-existent. At least that's what I would tell the jury if I didn't just go on the run outright. "Did Marowak call you anything?"

"Pretty sure he called me a dickhead when I was-"

" _Luke_."

"Oh, for fuck sakes, fine." Holy crap, even _thinking_ hurt. What did I do to deserve this kind of punishment? Oh, right, I was a horrible person. "Uh, there was a company spiel at one point. Pretty sure there was also something about being an odd specimen; once again, I really feel the need to thank you for recommending me to this place." Somehow, I doubted any of that would be considered useful information. Skitty's head popped back into my view, and I almost giggled when she rolled her eyes and mimed moving a beak up and down with her tail in front of her mouth. "Hahahaaa, what else… oh right. 'An amateur Aura adept with a… appre-something or other grasp on the applicable properties of the Dimensional Scream'."

The room once again went quiet when I finished talking. I seemed to be really good at achieving that effect today. I wonder if that was a move?

"I do not believe I know of this Dimensional Scream."

"They're my veams." Something shuffled beside me, drawing closer before finally revealing itself to be Chatot. I didn't appreciate the blank stare he was sending my way. "What? What else could they be? How special do you think I could possibly be?"

He blinked down at me. For some reason I suddenly felt very stupid.

"I have no clue." The emotion in his voice was about as barren as what I imagine Wigglytuff's sex life to be. Which was an absolutely horrifying mental image and I can't apologise enough for bringing it up. "Perhaps it could be your ability to complain so incessantly that a Pokémon in an alternate reality could hear you."

Chatot just made a joke. I don't believe it. If it hadn't been at my expense it may have even been funny.

From out of view once more, I could hear Skitty snort. Just once, just one little expulsion of air.

Traitor.

"Yeah, ha ha ha- wait a sec." Something in my addled brain clicked. Raising an arm that was shaking something fierce, I let it flop to the floor in what was vaguely Krabby's direction, briefly wondering if it would be possible to set that limb on fire like I could my leg. It certainly felt like it was on fire right now. "We've only got two beds, where the Hell is Krabby supposed to sleep? Are we even allowed to add members into our team?"

"Of course you are." Oh sweet zombie Jesus Chimecho was still in the room! I had to actively swallow rising bile as her voice scared the piss out of me, coming from somewhere right beside my head. "I run the assembly service here, managing all the new recruits joining pre-existing teams. Generally there is an experience barrier, but considering Krabby offered first and we have a written confession from a career criminal that you've all worked together before, that can be waived."

Oh. So they trusted a career criminal's word here over… wait a moment.

You know those times where you get what you know is a bad idea, and the worst part is how plausible it actually is? It sounds absolutely ridiculous, everything in the world including your own mind is telling you to not even entertain it, lest it grow and consume you? Yeah, I just had one of those bad ideas.

I had a lot more goals in life now than I did before I got to this world. There were the silly, there were the serious, and then there was this. This would take the cake of any achievement I'd ever reach in life. This was what would throw me headfirst into making history.

Who governed this world? I had no clue. Who was going to govern this world? I would have to go back on my vow to never go back to the dojo, but that was like saying I would never again eat liquorice in order to accomplish this goal. And I could be back to starving on the streets, I wouldn't touch liquorice with a ten foot street sign that I totally found and didn't destroy just for some fun.

What was this plan, you may ask? Well, it's quite simple. You see…

"Is there anything like…oh, say, a limit to how many people that can be recruited by one team?"

"Well, obviously the lowest a team can have in numbers is one, but if we're talking about upper limits… not that I can think of."

New. Ultimate. Life. Goal.

Skitty would still become a world class explorer, the best there ever was.

Along the way, I would raise an army capable of taking over the world.

Oooh, my spine just tingled a little bit. This was totally happening, no take-backsies.

"Hmm, interesting, interesting." My arm was just numb as I stroked my chin. The world had given up on telling me not to move, now it would just sit back and watch as I slowly destroyed myself. "Chatot, I have a proposal for both you and the Guild Master."

One second of silence. Two seconds of silence. Three seconds-

"I'm about to hear something entirely ridiculous, aren't I?"

"Whaaaaat? No, of course not." I waved my arm. A fair few times. You would have to kill me before I admitted to that all just being a muscle spasm I couldn't find any way to control. "I'm just going to dedicate my life to taking over the world."

I rolled onto my side, suffocating my out of control arm between the floor and my chest. Chatot was giving me a look that suggested he was severely regretting letting me in to the Guild in the first place, which was remarkably similar to the expression he always wore around me. Skitty was standing just out of arms reach from him, her slightly bowed head making her look distinctly resigned. Behind her, Krabby was… being Krabby.

None of them seemed to think I was joking.

Good. I would need professionalism like that in my bid for the top.

"Now, what would you, being the smart bird I… suspect you are, say in response to me telling you that I wish to start something of a Team Poképals Conglomerate, perhaps with the help of a few Wigglytuff Guild subsidies?" I spread my arms wide… and somehow lost my balance despite lying down. Something made a very loud noise when my arm came down onto the ground, and to this day, I still don't know what it actually was. "I mean, think about it, there must be plenty of jobs that are never completed due to lack of numbers. I happen to know where I can find access to a Gym that is reportedly displaced in time and therefore offers the infinite possibility of growing more powerful, perhaps I can talk you into allowing us operational headquarters and an increase in the number of our teleporty badge things proportional to the amount of people we manage to train up to a satisfactory… shall we say, Admiral level?"

"I'll allow it!"

I threw my arms into the air in triumph as Wigglytuff called out from somewhere out of my sight. Actually, I didn't move my arms consciously in any way. They were still slightly out of control.

"The Guild Master has spoken!"/"Guild Master, why would you do this!?" The triumph in my voice drowned out the exasperation and muted horror in Chatot's, my sudden good mood not even dimming when a couple of shiny badges flew in through the doorway and nailed me in the side of the head.

"Alright, I from now on my name is Overlord. You may all, however, call me Luke. This is the inner circle." With added sound effects courtesy of me, I whipped my hand around to point at Skitty, having to drag my arm back into position when it decided it didn't want to stop. "Your new codename is Admiral Meow!"

"…Sure, whatever."

My hand moved slightly to the side, thankfully landing on Krabby. "Vice Admiral Bubbles!"

"Krabby calls dibs on the Miracle Sea."

"I will allow it!" With a _ziooooom_ , the holy picking device landed on Chatot. "The… Informant. You need to have that pause for dramatic effect, by the way. Otherwise it doesn't work that well."

"No. I refuse to be, nor will I ever agree to be, part of this inane scheme."

"Too bad, your liege has pointed, you should have moved to the side or something before I started talking." With only one person left, I fell onto my back, coming face to face with Chimecho. "…Private Den Mother?"

Chimecho may have smiled at me. It was kind of difficult to tell. "OK!"

"Alright, sweet!" Clapping once, I pushed myself back until I was properly perched on the bed, holding up a hand to stall what was most likely to be something counterproductive from Chatot. "Dismissed, I'm going to fall unconscious now because I am actually in so much pain that I can't feel how much pain I'm in. No idea what you're pumping through my veins, by the way, but I would like a lot more of it!"

"Wait, Lu-!"

I was already _loooong_ gone before Skitty had even started talking.

 **XxX**

I'm thinking of starting a new schedule, working entirely on one fic per month to upload the subsequence month so I have something to upload while I type. Which would mean a full month of no uploads whatsoever, but what else is new?

It's never the heroes who try to take over the world, is it? Well, good for me, the main character of this story is no hero. He's also blitzed out of his mind, but isn't that when all the best plans come together?

Till next time!

 ** _X_**


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N:** *Pretending like I have a good reason for not updating in two months intensifies*

* * *

I ended up sleeping for almost two days.

Let me tell you, waking up after close to forty-eight hours of not doing anything but lie there? Not the most fun I've ever had. My muscles still ached, my stomach was in the process of eating itself, and long story short, never had my bladder been in direr straits.

The sun had been getting a little low in the sky by the time I opened my eyes, the lack of her presence telling me that Skitty must have been out on a job. With the other occupant away, the room was devoid of life except for me, something I pondered for a few seconds before a stabbing pain in my side dictated for me my next action.

People waved and smiled at me as I stumbled towards the toilets (how this world had heard of indoor plumbing was beyond me, but I was too happy with the revelation to bother questioning it in the first place), which only gave me something to contemplate as nature took its course with me. Judging from the snippets of conversation I could make out through the walls, word had somehow gotten out that I had gotten stomped into the ground by a Moltres, whatever that was.

Apparently my continued survival was impressive. Oh well, it was a better adjective than what I had heard be directed in my direction before now.

How big would a bar of soap have to be before it could effectively cleanse Loudred's mouth?

Clearly I only ever asked myself the most important of questions.

Relief was the only thing on my mind by the time I was stumbling out of the bathroom and down some of the Guild's few poorly lit corridors. There were no windows, and thus nothing to crack open in order to get rid of the smell, but the little luminescent mushroom things they had lining the walls were far cooler to look at than any clouds.

There were three regular apples and one big apple in the bag I had left in my shared room. The regular apples were demolished, seeds and all, in record timing. The big apple would go on to accompany me as I wandered out into the main area of the Guild.

People spoke to me. That was something I hadn't been expecting. There were holes in the usual ranks, to be filled later by those who were currently out on jobs, for which I was intensely grateful. It seemed every present had something to discuss with me, and being the tired and hungry young man that I was, I kept myself quiet as they yammered on, silently marvelling at how there could be so much apple in the palm of my hand in that moment.

Chatot had stopped by briefly to congratulate me and had been off before I could swallow the piece of apple I'd been chewing and get a single word in. Loudred had left a few Pokemon at the gates as he pointed out the scar that ran down one side of my face, which according to him looked like a crescent. Corphish may have been drunk when he accosted me on the stairs and babbled about… something. The rest of the afternoon had gone towards people I didn't know and had no interest in meeting, but did so anyway for lack of anything else to do.

Bidoof at least managed to smile at me. How he did so with my intimidation factor being multiplied by an alleged scar was anyone's guess. Maybe he was really some sort of psycho who relished other people's pain.

Hmm… nah.

The sun had sunk and the insides of the Guild were stained orange by the time I finally managed to disengage from my latest conversation, my head spinning with useless gossip and numerous requests for me to retell the story of my suffering. I'm not sure how many people ended up believing me, but with nothing left to do and nobody left to talk to, I decided to hunker down next to Croagunk, silently dropping a small pile of pilfered blue berries on his counter to share as I waited out the rest of the day.

"It's because you look a lot happier, meh heh heh," he'd told me after I'd expressed my confusion, the berries and other Pokémon that had been occupying the room long gone. It had become impossible to see the opposite end of the room by then, and Skitty still hadn't returned from wherever it was she had disappeared off to, "something good happen between you and that little partner of yours?"

I'd tossed a random pebble from the ground beside me into his cauldron, which earned me the most indignant noise I'd ever heard the amphibian make. He'd then proceeded to flip me off as I bade him goodnight, muttering about trades and 'blue furry assholes' all the while as I stumbled my way down the corridor and entered the room I shared with Skitty.

Checking to make sure there was still a decent pile of blue berries in my bag, because those things worked spectacularly as a painkiller despite showing up every time I turned a corner in every single dungeon I entered, I fell backwards into my straw, turning to the window with the intent of waiting the moon out until Skitty returned.

It couldn't have been five minutes later that I was asleep.

 **XxX**

"THREE, SMILES GO FOR MILES!"

My unenthusiastic voice was entirely drowned out by the raucous cheers around me, my eyes too busy searching the crowd to actually notice the finger I had been twirling in a way that could only have been labelled sarcastic. The spot next to me was empty; Skitty hadn't been in bed when I had been woken up that morning, and Loudred had claimed ignorance of her location after I had asked him.

Given how early he was up and about, that had burned away my best chance of gathering info pretty quickly.

Everyone had started moving away, no doubt to follow along with whatever orders they had been given while I was distracted. I remained where I was, keeping one eye on the ladder in the case of my exploration partner returning as Chatot hopped towards me.

"Skitty has not yet returned?"

I shook my head. The words had been somewhat… clipped. Perhaps he was in a hurry.

"Please go and locate her. She hasn't taken any jobs within the last two days, so I would suspect she is nearby."

I opened my mouth to respond, but Chatot was already making his way back to where he usually spent his days, huddled close to the wall as he worked through his paperwork that probably should have been done by Wigglytuff or answered the questioned asked of him.

The dismissal was loud and clear in my ears. Scaling the ladders back to surface level, I hooked my hands around the gate, pulling it up far enough to have sufficient room to roll under. It normally worked well to annoy anyone who had anything to do with maintaining the gate, but it was far quicker than waiting for it to open on its own and I… wasn't necessarily in a hurry, but I was getting a little anxious.

Skitty could take care of herself, and presumably, she had Krabby with her. Even so, the question of where she could have gotten to while I was unconscious hadn't yet been answered, not to mention the blow to her already insufficient self-confidence over the fact that I, her partner, had gotten the shit kicked out of me on two occasions while she had been elsewhere. Not the best track record for a rookie team, I assume.

Still, where would she have gone? Into town was one possibility, the beach was another. The prospect that she was lost in the surrounding wilderness also presented itself, which I went out of my way to ignore; I had more faith in her than that. The town offered more ground that I would have to cover, but it would also provide witnesses. The beach had less room to manoeuvre and no permanent residents, but it was also closer than town and now I was worried that Skitty had managed to go ahead and get herself caught in the waves. Could Skitty even swim?

Shit.

Beach it would have to be. Then it would be town, and then… raise the alarm and send out the search parties, I guess.

With that plan of action, I set out.

The path down to the beach hadn't changed in any of the few occasions I had taken it, leaving me time that would usually go into observing my surroundings. That time immediately went into observing my surroundings, because like a hypocrite would, the first thing I noticed upon turning the final tree along the route was a series of wooden frames, laid out in an approximation of a cabin's foundations. A very small cabin's foundations, granted, but a cabin nonetheless.

And sleeping among the construction, curled up on an unstable looking wooden beam with her tail in her mouth, was Skitty.

Well, that didn't take very long.

Taking a moment to marvel at the structure and how secure it did not appear one bit, I set forth, trying to map out some sort of path that would lead me to the nest that Skitty had made for herself. It wasn't the easiest task I had ever given myself – the whole thing kind of looked like that painting that had stairs on the ceiling and doors that probably led into an alternate dimension; I think it may have been called Relativity? Whatever, the point was that the building I was now scaling looked, sounded, and probably acted like an asshole.

The process of getting to the top of the winding framework was long and arduous. No shit, I think at one point I may have started walking upside down. A five minute walk along one never-ending wooden beam had led me back to the front of the Guild with the beach nowhere to be seen, and the look Krabby gave me after I passed him the fourth time could only be called pitying. Or maybe he was stuck in here too and it had been a desperate call for help; all I knew for certain was that I hadn't seen the sun in a while.

Eventually, I stumbled across Skitty.

I turned a corner, she stuck her foot out, and I tripped over it. Good news, though, my face broke my fall.

"Come on, up ya get." I mumbled into the wood before painstakingly peeling my head away, righting my nose with an obnoxious crack and spitting out a mixture of saliva, blood, and a tooth that I probably didn't really need in the first place anyway. It was just slowing me down, yeah.

Skitty didn't stir.

I swiftly kicked her in the side before pretending that I had only just arrived.

Skitty stirred.

"Haa… Luke?" I think I saw one of Skitty's ears disappear into the abyss as she stretched, the empty space reoccupying itself as Skitty's back popped and tail swished. I didn't move as a line of saliva whipped across the ground beside me, to move in here was apparently to lose. "What time is it? Did I miss the morning cheer?"

Something behind the wood to my left groaned. I did my best to ignore it.

"Luckily enough for you, yes you did." I took a single step back the way I had come; big mistake. Staring down into the hole that had been opened in the wood before my foot could actually touch it, I shivered as the hundreds of rocky spires along the bottom of the vertigo-inducing drop all seemed to shine in unison, looking far too thirsty for blood to possibly be any form of natural occurrence. "So what's… uh…" gesturing into the hole, I glanced back at Skitty, who was busy looking all around herself and frowning. Great. "What's all this about?"

Something behind the wood to my right cackled. I did my best to ignore it.

"Huh? Oh… well, you said you wanted to recruit more Pokémon to the team, so I decided to get started on building some new homes for whoever we come across." I think Skitty may have been pretending to not have heard the scream that echoed from down one of the perpetual corridors. She started walking, her head down and eyes on the ground, a series of actions that I mirrored perfectly. I mean, who knew what the next patch of existence that would try to end mine would be?

"I mean, it's not much, but…" I may not have been able to see her face, but I could tell that the conversation we were about to have was in the entirely wrong place at the entirely wrong time. "Can I ask you something, Luke?"

When has that question ever been asked by someone not related to you and not been life-altering in some way, I mean really? The last time I had been part of a conversation that had opened up with that line, I had woken up half a day later, face down in a ditch and with my favourite dictionary missing. True, it was also my only dictionary, but I used to read that thing every night before I went to sleep. It was calming, something you typically didn't come across in those conditions.

The point is that nothing good ever came from hearing that line.

"Go for it." It was probably through the virtue of the dead tone my voice would generally take regardless that I managed to choke the trepidation out of auditory range. It certainly wasn't helping that none of the wood around me seemed very familiar, nor that this was the third time that Skitty had walked into something that should have been easy enough to avoid. I don't know where the source of light was, but it was bright enough in here to see where you had to go if you didn't want to break your own nose.

Skitty had pulled ahead of me, somehow making it twenty steps down an adjacent corridor even though I had only been two behind her when we turned the corner. I had to jog to catch up, and it was only when I was directly behind her again that she chose to continue the conversation.

"…Why did you agree to make a team with me? Pokémon that want to take over the world don't become explorers, they hide out in dungeons and make life worse for everyone else. So… why become an explorer?"

I almost tripped over a dent in the floor. The hand I used to steady myself against the wall sunk a few inches in before I managed to yank it back. Hopping to the side to avoid the log that came swinging at me from above, I turned on my heel and shuffled back three steps, not feeling my back impact the wall as I fell through it and landed directly at Skitty's feet.

All the while, I was thinking.

Why had I decided to become an explorer in the first place? It felt like the initial decision had been so long ago, the alternatives spurned by confusion and what was likely some amount of fear. I mean, I had literally fallen into another world; I still had no idea to return to where I came from. I didn't want to go back, not by any means, but the finality was absolutely terrifying.

There were those few things that I would miss, either people or items. I would treasure the few months I got to talk to that one veteran who had decided to pass through the park I had chosen that night to sleep in. I had actually been reading my dictionary by the light of the street lamp beyond the fence when he had sat down next to me, and we'd talked. We'd laughed, at the world and at the prospect of one day running it.

He was an adventurer, I could recall him telling me in his somewhat broken English.

An explorer.

Looking up at Skitty, it was easy to see she wasn't some elderly man who had crooked teeth when there just wasn't a complete gap. Obviously, she was some form of cat, but she… she was good memories. She carried the same spirit as the weathered man whose name I had never been told.

"I guess… because you asked me to." Rolling to my feet, I stumbled slightly as the wood around me shifted, until I was looking out upon an endless stretch of blue. I have no idea how or why we were so high right now; I think I would have been able to touch the clouds through the window the building we were in had just decided to make if I tried really hard, but I didn't feel like trying in that moment. I don't think either of us had ever been that high up, so instead we side by side stood in silence, looking out across the waves far below us.

Somewhere far to the side, a bird trilled. For once, I could approve of the distraction granted by this bizarre place.

"Skitty, back where I come from, there isn't really much of a chance of realising any dreams. You would have to fight if you wanted to get anywhere. Granted, it wasn't like that to that extent for most people, I was just one of the less fortunate ones, but now I have a chance. I've got a chance to look at the ocean and decide I want to own it; I've got the means of accomplishing that if I want to."

Skitty glanced up at me, something I noted from the corner of my eye. That was some impressive willpower she was putting on display; my eyes were glued to the water below and nothing I did could convince them to move.

"You didn't answer my question."

The wood on either side of us closed once more. A sigh escaped me as breathtaking blue was replaced with irritating brown, returning me to the second labyrinth I had been forced to traverse in all my time in this world.

"Yes I did. I decided to become an explorer because you asked me to become an explorer with you." It wasn't the full story, not even close, but it was still true. Skitty was entirely unconvinced, a single look at her expression told me that much, and together we set off once more, me falling back a few steps to allow Skitty to take the lead. "And I hope you're not having second thoughts, because I've already decided that you're going all the way to the top, even if I have to drag you."

Turns out letting Skitty lead the way was a mistake. She froze, and I continued walking until I slammed into her back, which would have sent both of us tumbling if I hadn't managed the get a grip around her waist and use her own weight to balance myself and, consequently, her out.

"…But why me?" I heard from the enclosure that was my arms, a voice too meek to belong to a species as proud as a feline, "How can you be so confident that I'll make it?"

I couldn't help it, I snickered. Inappropriate, rude, dissonant, I'm well aware. It was just so easy to overlook your own good qualities sometimes, I knew that well enough from experience.

It was a common question that everyone asked themselves, wasn't it? Did they have what it took to pursue their dreams? The talent or the passion or simply the motivation? I honestly didn't know if I did, but my little partner here was plenty passionate when it came to the idea of exploring. She was surrounded by people who would actively work with one another like a self-sustaining, mechanized motivation machine.

And how much talent did it seriously take to walk around places, really? The closest you would need was the ability to fight, and I'd watched Rock Types be Tackled through solid walls with nothing but a skull and two meters to build up momentum.

Some things were just inevitable. Like the drinking problem I would develop after eventually retiring and figuring out where this place kept all its liquor.

"Well, it was more of a first come first serve kinda deal. I mean, I'd probably be helping those two assholes who stole your stone back when we first met to be the best criminals in the world if they'd come across me first. I'm kind of easy like that." Skitty's tail came up to slap me over the head. The smile on her face didn't disappear from my view just because she tried burrowing her face into my arm, I knew that I'd managed to lighten her mood. "But seriously, I guess the reason I'm so confident can't exactly be put into words. Sometimes you just look at someone and you can tell they're going to go on and do great things, you know?"

"…Not really, no."

I chuckled and pushed her away from my chest, dancing around her in the narrow corridor to take up the leading position and continue the conversation over my shoulder.

"Yeah, me neither. Anyway, forget the analogy, because I happen to know a specific dojo that comes equipped with some freaky time-space fuckery. You know what that means? You'll eventually be the best there ever was, because if worse comes to worst and you're incapable of making any progress, then we can just keep crawling along until you get there!" My enthusiasm was pretty much an complete farce, in the event that did happen then it would suck the life and soul out of both of us, but the pout on Skitty's face made the thought process more than entertaining enough to be worthy of continuation. "Don't worry about that, though, you've got potential. Maybe. Hmm, maybe we should just wait until I usurp leadership of the planet, so I can send some people out and they can map the world out, thus fulfilling your dream by proxy?"

A fluffy tail flicked me on the back of the head. "Jerk."

The tunnel of wood curved around in what I could have sworn was a complete circle before I blinked, and we were back on the beach. If I had been paying more attention to the sky and not the building when I arrived, I probably would have been able to tell you for certain if the sun had moved at all since the last time I had seen it, but I can tell you that it was a close thing.

"Hey, Luke?" I tilted my head to the side, not taking my eyes off the contemporary abstract art of a building that we had just stumbled out of, lest it leap forth and swallow us whole once more. "Where is it that you come from? It sounds like you've… you haven't really had an easy life, have you?"

I barely stopped myself from heaving a sigh. Too soon, there were still limits to my comfort. Not gonna lie, I was a bit disappointed in myself for how quickly I decided to dodge the inquiry.

"Well, I'm still alive, so it couldn't have been too difficult." That wouldn't be enough, no matter how much I wished that it would be, Skitty deserved at least a little more than that. "I promise, one day I'll tell you about where I come from. Given how freakishly trusting you are, I have no doubt you'll buy whatever I tell you, but it's a long story and I don't have all the pieces. 'Fact, I probably never will."

That was a fairly pretty way of saying 'I don't want to talk about it', if I do say so myself.

"Well, whatever." Yeah, I could only wish it would continue to be that easy. Spoiler, it wouldn't. "You've got a new home now, right? Your old one doesn't need to matter. Let's get back to the Guild, we can get some work done and then afterwards I'll-"

"Get some sleep." I cut in, crossing my arms. As soon as she was asleep I was taking a Force Palm to whatever was holding the thing behind me up, because if I did it while she was awake it might upset her.

"But I'm building-"

"I'm not gonna become Overlord overnight, Skitty, don't worry too much about it." Please, don't worry about it. Nobody would ever join my enterprise if that was what they had to come home to every evening. I'd have protests within a week. "We'll grab a job, then you'll take a load off and I'll go ask around town about construction. How much sleep did you get last night?"

Skitty yawned, her jaw opening far enough for the crack of bone to be audible. I'm pretty sure I heard her mumble something about a few minutes as she was closing her mouth.

"That's what I thought, come on."

 **XxX**

"So, a suspicious waterfall, huh? At least my interest in this one shouldn't… stagnate. Eh? Eh? Skitty, don't you walk away from me without some form of acknowledgement! Krabby, how dare you follow her?! Where did you even come from?"

 **XxX**

So the new schedule isn't working as planned. Which means I'll just keep updating everything in any random order until I finally go mad. Well, madder.

.o/

 ** _X_**


	12. Chapter 12

"…It is water."

"…Yes it is."

"…And it is falling."

"…Yes it is."

"…It is a waterfall."

I broke my stare with the proclaimed waterfall in favour of shooting Krabby a blank look. "Really?"

Given his species' convention for walking sideways, Krabby was already facing me before I'd even started talking. I _swear_ he rolled his eyes, but his face was back to normal too quickly for me to be sure. "It is water and it is falling. Krabby does not know what Luke wants."

Our staring contest lasted for three more seconds. In those three seconds, I did nothing but wait until my eyes had dried out so that I had a reason to blink, turning back to the water that was falling a few meters away from me.

It was definitely water. And it was certainly falling.

I had to remind myself that yes, this was the special assignment Chatot had given us. I'd double-checked the map that I could barely read before we'd set off, and I'd triple-checked it once we got here. We were supposed to be investigating this waterfall. We were supposed to be investigating this generally clear liquid, that was currently moving perpendicular to the rock surface beyond it, abiding by the will of gravity.

Fuckin' A.

Shaking my head, I glanced at Skitty, who had been knocked to the ground some minutes ago and had yet to get up. "Any ideas?"

Because I was out. I'd never had any in the first place. We had rocked up to this wall, and had just been standing here ever since. Except Skitty, who had somehow managed to get away in the _two seconds_ I had my back turned and decided that maybe charging a solid rock surface was the best possible idea available to us at the time. All she had managed to do was reaffirm my belief that she needed to be kept under constant supervision.

"There's something behind it." I raised my eyebrows as Skitty climbed to her feet, her expression tight and resolute. "I saw it."

She saw it, huh? I'd been scrutinising the damn thing for ages, and nothing I'd seen had suggested anything of the sort. And come to think of it… "and you didn't say anything before now… because?"

And just like that, the resolution left Skitty's body so quickly that a void opened up, and she wilted in on herself in a desperate attempt to fill it in. "uh, heh… I wasn't sure until now?"

"You still don't sound very sure," was my comment as I stepped towards the waterfall, my trust in Skitty doing nothing to assuage the overwhelming doubt in her words. My body, on the other hand, was having none of that shit, which was why I was already two steps away from the water, my eyes narrowed and hand cupping my chin thoughtfully. Nope, still nothing.

I took one more step…

What was that noi- OH GOD NO.

My vision swam as a multidimensional warble filled my ears. I tried throwing myself back, but by the time I realised what was happening, my body had already locked into the position that it would no doubt be staying in until the trance was over. My hand on my chin and my foot still in the air, I could do nothing but watch as the edge of our little outpost rushed up to meet me, along with the crashing waves below.

Welp, shit. May as well look on the bright side in all this sudden darkness.

Maybe the water would manage to beat me into a less embarrassing pose by the time rigor mortis set in.

 **XxX**

I was not thrilled that this asshole of a waterfall was the first thing I got to see once the darkness had finally lifted.

I tried to throw my arms up in exasperation, and maybe so I could properly flip off whatever cruel and merciless deity had decided to toy with me, but I found that my arms wouldn't budge. Not only that, but now that I was actually paying attention, it turned out my legs were no longer under my control either.

I was walking towards the waterfall.

My eyes tried to blink. It didn't work.

I didn't want to walk towards this waterfall. I had bad memories of this place; they'd only become memories a few seconds ago! Wait, what was the progression of time in here compared to out there- oh, like I actually gave a crap.

What was far more deserving of my focus was the fact that the waterfall was slowly getting bigger. From the bottom of my vision, I could just make out the tips of some pink feet – sans toes – and that told me two things. First, the fact that I could no longer move my head around, control my limbs, or even blink independently implied that this time, I was in for some weird internal body point of view shenanigans for this little adventure.

Second, _this fucking clown was picking up speed what no_.

 _"Uh, buddy?"_ My voice came out as an echo that I couldn't have told you with confidence was real. It sounded like it was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Which is a shitty explanation, but I was currently trapped within some moron's head on what very well could have been an astral plane so spare me your judgement. _"You do realise that's a wall, right?"_

Whoever this person was, it was obvious they couldn't hear me. Stubby little arms had made it into my vision now, swinging back and forth as my new ride accelerated from a brisk walk to a brisk jog.

I couldn't even slump down as I whined, this dumbass' pace getting more hurried with every second passing. If someone I was inside of during one of these veams died, would I die to? Would I just be ejected? Did I even want to leave if I was just going to suffocate as soon as I got back into my own body?

Holy crap, you fall into one alternate dimension and two more pile on. Was this normal?

 _"Oi, dickhead! Slow your damn roll!"_ Why give me control of my mouth if I wasn't given anything along with it? Never had I wanted to slap a concept I didn't understand so much bef…ore… this guy had just started rolling.

Could he hear me? Did he know I was in here?

…Was this now going to count as murder?

Head tucked in, arm clenched around his stomach so hard that I could feel it, ears that I hadn't noticed before folding down and cutting off the edges of my vision, and oh yes; seeing the ground and sky in rapid succession of one another probably helped lead me to that conclusion too.

Fuck me, I was gonna be sick.

Ground, sky, ground, sky, ground, water, darkness, ground, crystal- wait, what?

Abruptly, I snapped back to paying attention. My new ride was looking around, giving me a pretty nice view of the cavern he'd stumbled upon. I was just glad he'd gone back to using walking as a preferred method like any civilised folk would.

Glancing over his shoulder, my valiant steed stared at the curtain of water he's just charged right through. I had the chance to look at his shadow on the wall as he turned, for all of a single second, before he was abruptly back to looking at the darkness, humming a merry tune as he took his first step further inside.

Something screeched in my ears as his foot hit the ground. The darkness around me became a void of nothingness. I guess my veams just didn't like spoilers.

 **XxX**

The first thing I did upon opening my eyes was blink.

It worked. Good.

Now. Was I dead?

A preliminary scan of my surroundings revealed to me that no, I was not dead. There wasn't nearly enough fire for that to be the case.

My scan also revealed to me the fact that I was still falling towards the water. Which was odd, because I was sure that more time would have passed here from wherever I was. This was an interesting case of time dilation I had on my hands.

Oh, and also?

"ARRRGGGHHH-grk-!"

Thank God for Krabby. His claw digging into my tail hurt like Hell, but at least the chance of losing a body part had been reduced to one that I wasn't likely to use anyway.

I was already scrutinising the waterfall as Krabby hauled me back up over the lip of our little outpost, a finger scratching idly at my chin as I glanced up. I could already hear Skitty rushing towards my back as I jumped as high as my legs could take me, which turned out to be pretty damn high, and held out a hand towards the cliff in front of me.

"Force Palm!"

The detonation blew a hole in the water, the disturbance spreading the further down it got, likely because of any lingering energy that was already taking up the space. I wouldn't know, I wasn't a buff on hydrodynamics and ethereal life energy. All I knew was that the cave behind this waterfall did indeed go this high up, and that gave me a very dumb idea.

I had another Force Palm readied in my hand by the time I landed. My body began to glow as the energy for a Quick Attack started flowing through it. Just to be safe, I flicked the little metaphorical switch in my brain that triggered Endure. "Krabby, can you do that thing that makes me go fast?"

"Agility."

I didn't feel any difference, but after a few seconds had passed I nodded – either a job well done or a yeah, that – and turned back around to address Skitty. I hadn't expected her mid-launch, but I caught her with relative ease and was depositing her on the ground a moment later.

"There's something behind there, you were right." For a heartbeat she was still, before her head fell to the side. I merely nodded, straightening up and making sure the slowly gathering ball in my palm was still secure before I relayed my admittedly thrown together plan.

"I'm not sure Force Palm residue will do to both of you, so I'll blow a hole in and jump through, then do the same on the other side higher up. If I haven't shown signs of life five seconds after the water returns to normal, then make some preparations for a funeral." I couldn't help but wink cheekily as Skitty opened her mouth. "I would like to be chopped up into six pieces, have each piece be put into a suitcase, and each suitcase thrown into the ocean at a different point in the world. Until then!"

That was when I decided to do something new.

Pivoting on my heel, I spread my hand out, flinging the Force Palm straight towards the water. And Krabby, but he managed to duck out of the way before it could get close enough to react to his presence.

The little orb wobbled along its path, a high pitched keen following along behind it as it impacted the waterfall. I had taken off before I had time to actually register the explosion, and as such had to dig in my heels at the last second to avoid being flung in the opposite direction.

Wow, that was loud. And apparently very destructive; just something else I would have to work on later, I suppose.

Steam was what greeted me as I hurled myself through the opening I had created. I hadn't actually expected the hole to be any bigger than my hand, which was why I did my level best to emulate an arrow as I flew, but I needn't have bothered in the first place. The opening could have fit all three of us if we got very comfortable with one another, but the plan was made and I wanted to stick to the plan.

…Good lord, I had been hired to throw explosives made out of me at water and stumble around dark, unknown territory in search of some form of treasure. This was my life. I had _chosen_ this.

I flicked another Force Palm into the water as I puzzled over that, closing my eyes as the displaced liquid sprayed in all directions. I ended up a little bit drenched, but the two thumps on either side of me probably meant my idea was a success.

Cracking open an eye, my lips tilted up slightly as I took in Skitty's broad grin and the bored slant running across Krabby's eyes. The cave was fairly dark, but there was enough light where we were standing to actually see what we were standing on.

Skitty and I were on stone. Krabby was in a pool of water.

…And no crystals. Lame. I had actually been looking forward to that part.

Bowing mockingly close to the ground, I swept one hand up to my chest, the other stretching out behind me to gesture towards where shadows morphed into inky blackness. "Shall we?"

My smile grew just a little bit wider as a soft tail thumped against my head. If I had to attempt to replicate what it sounded, I would probably have provided a short ' _bing_ '.

"Don't black out on the edge of anymore cliffs!" Skitty was trying to scowl at me. I say trying, because the only evidence was the slightest twitching at the edges of the beam she was directing straight into my face. Before I could get a word in edgewise, her tail was around my waist, my feet kicking up twin clouds of dirt as I was dragged further into the cave. "And also YES, let's GO!"

I allowed my body to go limp in Skitty grip as I caught Krabby's eye, shrugging as though to say, 'explorers, am I right?'

He just wordlessly followed along.

 **XxX**

I couldn't help but roll my eyes as Skitty pushed herself onto her hind legs, her efforts to pull the massive crystal we'd found amounting to little more than a very enthusiastic hug. I would have offered my help, but before I could even take a breath Skitty had turned around, her tail wrapped around the bottom of the gem and her legs kicking up dust and gravel as she sprinted in place.

"Come OOOOONNNNNNNNN!"

Her frustrated yowling was adorable, hilarious, and completely understandable. After the day we'd just had, we all deserved to find some way to unwind.

The cave was dark. Not in the metaphorical or traditional sense, I was talking absolutely pitch black. Skitty and I had powered up a Foresight five steps into the damn place, and that hadn't helped one bit. While I was no expert on how Foresight worked, I did know that you needed even a tiny bit of light to get night vision working.

We were shit out of luck in that regard. Two turns in, and we were walking basically blind. Sure, we could see the outlines of other people if they were nice enough to walk into our line of sight, and the very, very dark blue smudges in amongst the nothingness was vaguely identifiable as water, but the difference between wall and air was if your nose was being smushed into your face or not with every step.

With me taking the lead as was pretty much standard procedure by now, I was the one generally running into the walls. Skitty got off pretty lightly by not following my example, but she had her moments too.

Krabby could just count his lucky stars that he was a Water Type. He'd fallen into so many pools that he probably would have drowned three times over if he wasn't able to breathe underwater.

It took one of us two hours to remember I could set my leg on fire. It had worked for about five minutes, but trying to fight and avoid all the water on the ground while maintaining the flame was a logistical nightmare. Eventually my legs had just gotten too wet for me to set them alight at all, and we'd been forced back into darkness.

And the fighting… if we didn't split up, we'd hit each other. If we did split up, it was a game of Marco Polo from whatever circle of Hell was watery to meet up again. If we tried to run, we'd smack into a wall and be forced to fight anyway. Between the three of us, we must have caused at least a dozen rockslides just from attacks going wide and hitting the walls.

Krabby had suggested we keep knocking shit down until we opened up a few holes and got to see where we were going. After the first boulder had landed on my head (when I'd just so happened to be Enduring a pressured blast of water that was being shot into my face from somewhere near my feet, lucky), that plan had been scrapped. Which was a shame, because even if it wasn't the best plan, it was exactly what this damn place deserved.

At that point, we'd been in here for six hours. The only reason I hadn't burst into tears of pure frustration was the well-practiced stiff upper lip I'd employed to keep from giving away our position to yet another ambush, though the humidity in the air probably could have replaced all the lost fluids on its own. It only got harder to breathe the further in we ventured.

I was about ready to start digging through the walls with my fingernails when finally, it happened. A speck of light, no chance of it being noticeable if it weren't literally the only light surrounding us, had appeared around another corner. I'd almost taken my eye out on a jagged stone in said wall, but that wasn't important.

What was important was the massive crystal we had found at what must have been the end of the dungeon, that Skitty was now trying to remove by… chewing on the base.

I rolled my eyes once more, turning to Krabby and holding up a single, glowing palm. "May I?"

Krabby just nodded. He knew what was up.

"Ta." My hand fell down to my side, the sphere growing inside of it getting brighter with every step I took towards the crystal. Skitty must have noticed I was approaching, because one second she was there, the next she was off to the side, watching with no small amount of vindictive glee as I stopped within a single bound of the treasure, the Aura I was gathering actually cracking the ground beneath my feet.

It really was a lovely crystal. Nice and bright, with so many pretty colours. I would really miss it once I sold its ass and used the money to hire a crew to blow this fucking cave off the face of the planet.

The grin that cracked my face was downright demonic as I sprang forward and shoved my hand into where the crystal was buried in the ground. Literally shoved, I made it up to my wrist into the stone. What can I say, I was in a bad mood.

"Force Palm!"

The crystal came loose. I attempted to steady it with my free hand as it toppled down on top of me, before hastily pulling the other out of the ground when it became apparent that the crystal was more powerful than I had given it credit for.

The initial struggle was short, but iconic. I redirected the crystal with the palm I had managed to free just in time and handed it off to the ground, which took the weight like an absolute champion and executed the mother of all inverted atomic drops on it. I knew there was a reason I tagged that beautiful bastard in.

I probably looked a few steps past delirious as I spun around to my team, my arms in the air and my head thrown back in triumph. Skitty was cheering, and the clacking of Krabby's claws against one another filled the cavern.

 ** _*CLICK*_**

My eyes snapped open. Krabby's applause slowed to a halt.

 ** _*KER-CHUNK*_**

Skitty's celebration died down to little more than a whisper.

 ** _*WOOSH*_**

The three of us shared a look. The trepidation in our little triangle of gazes was so dense I could taste it.

Mechanically, our heads all turned to peer into the darkness to our left. Whatever lay beyond it, it was rumbling and crashing and smashing and getting louder with every second.

With what may very well have been the last conscious decision I would be making in this lifetime, I reached out a palm covered in Aura and lay it against the crystal. With a bit of mental effort, I reached the natural energy that remained within it, wrapping it up with my own and effectively fusing the two of us together. I wasn't sure if it would work or not, but if I was about to face down whatever was coming for us right now then there was no real reason to not at least try.

For all intents and purposes, this crystal and I were now one. It was my brother in all but blood. Our souls were intermingled on a spiritual level. We were closer to one another than the most intimate of lovers.

If I ended up dragging it into the afterlife with me, so be it.

This fucking thing was _ours_. Putting it on the market, smashing it to pieces and building a nice chandelier out of it, grinding it down and injecting it into our veins; whatever. We'd stumbled through this damn cave and called dibs on it, so come Hell or high water, I was not going to let go of it. If someone else wanted it, then they'd have to take my hand along with it, because as far as I was concerned it was now part of me.

Our adversary finally entered the light. I looked up… and up… and up… and that's the ceiling of the cave. Well.

That was some pretty high water.

Shit.

 **XxX**

This chapter is very wet.

I wrote it during a thunderstorm.

There was hail and stuff too.


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N:** This story now has a Sufficient Velocity thread. It's a pretty cool place. Sometimes I drop a drawing or two. You wanna check it out, then I'm sure you could find it.

I suck at drawing, but I still drew the cover for this story. I wanted a Riolu that looked annoyed, so I made one myself.

* * *

Let me ask you something real quick. If you were faced with a force of nature far greater than yourself, with two teammates to worry about, all the while spiritually bound to a crystal three times your size that you had just torn out of the ground, what would you do?

Now, the correct answer is nothing, because you're not dumb enough to get yourself into such a predicament. Unfortunately, I am not you, which left me in a cavern, facing down a force of nature far greater than myself, with two teammates to worry about, all the while being spiritually bound to a crystal three times my size.

What, did you think I was being hypothetical?

I didn't know how long I had until the water would be on top of us. Probably not nearly long enough, if I had to take a guess. The cavern offered me nothing as I searched frantically for something, anything that could possibly help us in this scenario.

Unbidden, a tiny giggle bubbled up from my throat. I would have slapped myself if I had the time or the appropriate environment to do so, but I would have to sort out my personal problems later. Right now, even if it was never made official, I was the leader of Team Poképals. If I let myself do nothing but panic, then we were all dead.

Skitty was making her way towards me, for what reason, I'll probably never know. Krabby was eyeing the way we'd come, and the enormous pile of rocks that I hadn't even noticed had fallen to block it off. I could see the panic on both their faces.

My lips split into a wide grin for a moment, a maniacal cackle leaving my mouth before I slapped my free hand over it. The laughter echoed through the cavern, audible even over the water that was bearing down on us, and the faintest of ideas was beginning to take hold in my mind.

Still not quite able to shake the smile, I shot a glance at the water, planting my feet against the floor as Aura began to gather in my hands. The waves easily reached the ceiling of the cavern, and that was a fair distance above our heads. I had to reactivate my Foresight as I fell backwards, throwing myself off balance entirely and bringing the crystal with me.

The water had been activated by us moving the crystal, which meant that it could be contained. The fact that it reached so high probably meant that the stone around us was watertight, which was something I would have to change unless I felt like going for a swim.

Swimming itself wasn't too bad. Swimming through a current that could crush me, with no chance of getting my head above the water, while no doubt being assaulted by rocks from all angles? Not quite so fun.

My eyes _flew_ over the roof of the cave, simultaneously knowing exactly what they were looking for and not having the faintest clue what they were looking for. Somehow, I just knew that I would know it when I saw it- there! Just behind me, a slight colour change upon the stone, where the depth of the shadows went the tiniest bit further in.

Images began to flash through my mind, sinister and sinful and downright scary in some cases. As I increased the flow of the Aura that I was pumping into the crystal, I saw the entire world slowly sink into the murkiest depths imaginable. When the force I was about to exert _doubled_ in the time it took to think about blinking, I saw the sun doused by a tidal wave that moved on to swallow the rest of the universe.

When I released the crystal from my grip and it flew into the ceiling so fast that my eyes couldn't actually follow it, I could _feel_ more than _see_ the homes that I had just ruined. I laughed, though it sounded far more like a _scream_ , when it impacted against the ceiling. The Aura within it, _my_ Aura, kept it in one piece. The ceiling wasn't quite so lucky, as boulders bigger than the crystal itself began to rain down upon us.

I didn't even realise I had Skitty in my grip until I was gently pushing her back the way she had come. I was actually pretty damn scared in that moment, because I both knew exactly what I was trying to do while also having no idea what the fuck I was doing. All I knew was that if this little plan of mine was going to work, the water would need somewhere to go and solid stone wasn't going to give me the results I needed.

I had approximately no time to worry about being careful. All I needed was a blast of Aura to take out the floor in front of the rockslide I had just caused, so I just called on all of it at once.

That wasn't an exaggeration or a generalisation. I quite literally did call upon everything I had in that moment. That wasn't including the odd haze that was starting to rise from my limbs, but it joined in too, so whatever I guess.

The Aura didn't gather in my palms, didn't form any coherent shape or fill me with warmth. It just came forth in a rush, flooding from my hands and mouth and maybe even from my eyes, too. I had been going for the balls of Aura that I'd used in order to get into the cave, but now I couldn't see what was happening; my only view was the one my mind supplied me. One of myself, high in the air, raining down fire upon helpless cities and burning their populace to the ground. There was an odd roar shaking the walls, beyond that of the tidal wave I was trying to hold back, and it took me a second to realise that I was listening to myself within the throes of what had started as laughter.

Abruptly, the concentration I'd somehow managed to maintain cut itself off. The power I had felt coursing through me retreated. I had to stumble backwards as the ground began to splinter underneath the weight of the water, thankfully having the mental capacity to leap backwards when the first rock landed directly in front of me and cut off my view of the water entirely. Others followed, and before the flood had been given the chance to pass over where we had yanked the crystal out of the ground, a wall of boulders had stopped all progress it could have possibly made.

This all took about five or so seconds, keep in mind. And that was all before the coup de grâce occurred, in the form of the crystal that started this mess in the first place; the damn thing landed so close to me that I'm surprised it didn't manage to take my nose off, burying itself in the ground by the stem and doing a pretty good imitation of itself before we'd come along.

I'd never hated an inanimate object more in my life. At least it was cold, so when I rested my aching head against it, I no longer felt like ending my own life and taking the suffering with me. Even trying to open my eyes made my head throb, and the less said about the state of my throat after that little freak-out, the better.

Some of the things I'd seen, some of the things I'd thought about, the way I _couldn't stop laughing_ … what the _fuck_ was that?

"Krabby didn't know Luke could use Nasty Plot."

I grimaced, lifting my head away from the crystal so I could pull it out of the ground. No matter how hard I tried, the picture of me standing over someone I didn't even know, the ground red around us-

"Make sure I never use that again." My wobbly voice sounded weak even to my own ears, and it had nothing to do with the way my throat stretched painfully to accommodate each word. Nobody was ever born to be as loud as I had been, and I was now probably going to pay for it until the day was out. "I don't care if the world is ending. Never again."

Krabby stared up at me, his blank expression giving nothing away. Even in the doom and gloom of our current surroundings, I could see his expression, as blank as it had ever been. Shrugging to myself, I turned around, planting a shoulder against the crystal and throwing the entirety of my weight into one good shove.

It toppled over, kicking up a cloud of dust as it slammed into the ground. Skitty, oddly silent, stopped it before it could start to roll into the darkness, while I searched through my bag for something that would hopefully work towards getting rid of this headache that I was beginning to get.

My hand closed around something hard and cool to the touch, and my back stiffened in such a way to be extremely uncomfortable under the current circumstances.

"Don't you dare…" I murmured to myself, not even sure how to feel, as I withdrew my badge from the bag. You know, the teleportation badge, the one that I had managed to wrangle out of Wigglytuff while I was striking a deal with Chatot in order to take over the world? The ones that proved we were verified Explorers and we capable of instantly transporting things to the Guild? Yeah, that one.

Catching a ray of light, I tilted the badge until the light was shining on the crystal – and the stupid thing vanished. I could see Skitty's mouth dropping open from where I was standing, and even Krabby did a double take once he noticed it wasn't sitting there anymore.

Just to add insult to injury, a stone that was maybe the size of a pin-head chose that moment to buckle under the pressure, shooting out of the wall that I had constructed and hitting me in the side of the face with deadly accuracy. It did nothing but nudge my head to the side so that my ear was in the optimal place to fully take in the tiny surge of water that followed it.

Refusing to let the world beat me down any further, I shifted in my seat and turned the badge towards Krabby.

"If anything happens to that crystal, I will cry," I told him solemnly, looking him dead in the eyes to make sure that he knew that I had never been more serious in my life. "Don't make me cry."

The light hit him before he could respond, which worked out for me, because it hadn't been a request. Oh no, that had definitely been an order.

More of the stones were creaking against the weight of the water. I pointedly ignored them, searching instead for Skitty once I discovered she'd moved from her spot. I wasn't expecting her to be within breathing distance of my neck, but when I glanced to the side there she was, doing that thing where she looks right through me despite not having eyes.

Yeah, I'm still on that.

"Is there something we need to talk about?" She asked me without preamble, which was nice, because at that point I was pretty sure that the rockslide wasn't going to hold much longer.

"Once I figure it out, you'll be the first to know."

She smiled at me. I don't know what she was trying to convey, but she did, and I did my best to return it as I angled the badge towards her.

"I trust you," she managed to say, before the light bounced off her forehead and sent her back to the Guild. I stared at the dot of light that now occupied where she had stood, heaving a long sigh as I turned the badge on myself.

The first of the boulders came crashing down beside me. What had been a trickle became a flood as a veritable river bore down on me, smashing rocks out of the way now that it had an opening and further ruining what was left of this once picturesque place. I turned around to face the water, grasping my bag and offering the encroaching natural disaster a sneer that did nothing but make me feel slightly better about myself.

 _"Fuck you."_

With that, the ray of light landed on my face. Or, more specifically, my eye.

Yeah, you know what, whatever.

 **XxX**

"So I take it that your first exploration was successful?"

Having the sound of rushing water be replaced with Chatot's voice was discombobulating in its own right. Unfortunately for me, the badge had seen fit to transport me to the front gate instead of where Chatot was speaking from, which lead me to stumble blindly before my vision had caught up to my shift of position.

I don't know how many times I'd fallen down the ladder at that point. I can tell you that this wasn't the first time, it wouldn't be the last, and it probably wouldn't be the most embarrassing of my journeys. I tripped over my own feet, or maybe it was a root or a loose tile or the malevolence of some asshole deity far beyond my mortal comprehension. Either way, I ended up going down the ladder headfirst, knocking my skull against every rung on the way down.

I did get the presence of mind to Endure after the third hit, which was nice. I also managed to flip around half-way down, so that even if it was the back of my head hitting the ladder, I managed to land on my feet. I mean, if you ignored all the dents that I'd just caused and the fact that I was staggering about like a drunken toddler, the entire thing may have even looked graceful.

It didn't, not one bit, but it _may have_.

"So what are we looking at, Chatot?" I was definitely strutting as I made my way in between Skitty and Krabby, both of whom looked to be absolutely fine despite the travel. To be fair, I wasn't waving my arms around because I thought it looked cool, I was doing it so that I would be able to keep my balance.

I came to a stop beside Skitty, and draped one arm over Krabby's head. Krabby took one step back, but I didn't move; Aura kept my feet bound to the floor and my knees strong enough to support my own weight. Chatot eyed me for a moment, then the massive crystal that was lying between us.

"That all depends on what you want to do with your-"

"Sell it." Skitty interrupted, possibly for the first time in her life. If the way Chatot's beak was moving without actually forming words was any indication, he hadn't been expecting such a prompt response either.

"Sell it." Krabby concurred, still standing behind me.

Chatot and I exchanged looked, and I just shrugged at him. It didn't matter to me where the damn thing ended up, I just wanted to get it out of the cave. Sure, it would have been a nice decoration for our room, but if some shmuck was willing to pay money for it, then I wasn't about to complain.

"Sell it." With my cool pose, my blasé attitude, and my somewhat croaky voice due to a sore throat, I certainly looked the part of someone doing business with a crystalline substance of questionable quality. I nodded to myself, content with the image I provided, and didn't question the floating berry that prodded me in the side of the head.

I took it and swallowed it after one bite, so hopefully I wasn't supposed to question it. The pain in my head and throat did lessen somewhat, so I may have been drugged in that moment, but I genuinely did not care.

Chatot hopped forward, coming up alongside the crystal and running a wing over it. He tapped at it a few times, twice with his other wing and once with his beak, before shrugging to himself and facing the three of us once more.

"I have no idea what it's worth," he confessed, not that I really blamed him. If it were up to me, it would be worth the entire world, but Chatot hadn't been in the cave so he was probably justifiably confused. "I can call in an expert, that won't cost you anything. I will warn you now that the split for treasures that have been brought to the Guild for examination and auction is sixty-forty, in your favour. If you want, you can sell it at the Kecleon Market, but you will likely be looking at drastically reduced prices."

I looked at Skitty. Skitty looked at me. I looked at Krabby. Krabby looked at me. Krabby looked at Skitty. Skitty looked at Krabby. I looked at the outlaw board behind Chatot. Skitty got distracted for a moment by a strand of hair that was floating by in the wind. Then, the three of us looked at Chatot.

"Here," we said in unison, which was honestly a little creepy. I don't know how we did it, but I never want to do it again.

Chatot looked between the three of us, then down at the crystal once more. He opened his beak, and a chime cut him off before he could actually say anything.

"Dinner is ready!" Came Chimecho's consistently happy voice. I swear I blinked, and in that next moment, the only things I had for company were vaguely bird, cat and crab shaped after-images. And then those faded away into nothingness, and I was left entirely alone on the second floor of the Guild.

I could already hear the beginning of the end in the dining room. Searching through my bag, I pulled out an apple, shoving it between my teeth as I grabbed the crystal and began pulling it towards the ladder.

I would go and eat in the room I shared with Skitty, as always. But damn it all if I was leaving this crystal unattended, after all we'd gone through to get it.

Bidoof flew past me when I reached the ladder, coming in hot from the front gate and doing his best to sink his teeth into my apple on the way down. He missed, instead tearing the first rung from the ladder as he tore out of sight below me.

I just shrugged and destroyed the second rung by throwing the crystal over.


End file.
